A Hip A Hip

At some point her hands became hands.

It spread: legs legs, ribs ribs, a hip a hip.

Eight lips lips, all kissing.

We became a pile of parts on a bed,

lefts and rights, rights and wrongs,

untouched by sun, limber, limp,

one foot wrapped in a damp magazine

like a pile of deli meat, left out in the heat,
beaded with sweat, dripping.

Kill/Keep

When a week had passed the most I could do

was clean. I did. I dumped the whole drawer of silverware into the sink
and rubbed each spoon like it could come to life and love me back.
I moved the couch to make space for my sadness,
and swept all the dust and the dirt and bits of glass

that had taken up life in the untended corners.

I roamed the rooms with a bag and sorted my things

Kill/keep, kill/keep, getting rid of everything I could.

That night I took out eight white bags of trash.

Ghosts. What you can live with, what you can live without.

The emptiness exacerbated mine. I put away the dishes

just fill to the cupboards. I dropped a brand new bowl
and it exploded on the counter, one white shard
slicing a C into me, in the pale skin of my wrist,

like it wanted me dead. In that moment I missed

you so much I thought I might spill from the cut, 

turn inanimate, turn to dust, turn to silver.
Then the C filled with blood. I was fine.

Dream

When I woke
I thought I was the sea

so I cut off my clothes,
but found I was made out of sand,
and I watched the bits of me get blown away. 

Falling Out

You see when I jumped in I never planned on being lifted in reverse, slow-motion from the pool, ripples racing inwards and reforming beads of water, flying up in perfect arcs and back to where my falling body had disturbed them from the surface, my body flying up back towards the diving board from where I came, hoisted as if by pulleys in a cheap theater production, the insides of my thighs shaking with nerves that said this wasn’t in the script, the faces at the pool all turned towards me like tiny satellites, honed in on  my body as it turned and walked with my command off the diving board, taking painstaking steps down the ladder one rung at a time, arriving at the concrete shaking, shrugging with apology to the line for what happened, dripping, head hung, flushed.