Matryoshka
“It’s a fiction,” you say,
“Paper-thin leaves stacked just so
can make the shape of a bull,
or a house, or even a girl,
and what are you anyway? You hold
your mother’s secrets in your right hand
your father’s guts in your left.
I can see all of your edges
and they look increasingly hand-drawn.
Your skin has taken on the tone of eggshell.
I can feel the sliver of space that floats your
insides a breath away
so that when I rap on your chest
I hear an echo knocking back,
like I have ventured deep inside you
and am trying to feel my way back out.
Is it really so empty inside? Is it quite
as black as you have painted it?
Because I jammed my fingers between
your ribs, remember, and cracked you
like a new book, only to find page after page
littered with someone else’s handwriting.
Your heart is a piece of raw meat
hanging suspended in the foyer.
What trap is this? You arrange your face
to look less like your mother but
the mirrors are warped and I’ve been
picking at the wallpaper, finding
layer under layer,
patterns of snakes among flowers,
diamonds on yellow,
the paper pulling back into the wall,
retreating from my hands,
getting smaller.”
