#29
ANCESTRY OF A BODY
Strain your ears to hear the fireflies
burning out of light. There you have it:
the repeated loop of the rest of my life;
a kaleidoscope having all versions of deja vu.
Your guns kneading into the air as
my hands tremble at the terror of a lie.
I’ll admit to it all. My chest wraps itself
up in edged origami, sharp by all that
I am yet to overcome; the lining of
my stomach razed by the concept of you
with another woman. This thing called
the heart flips itself to death like a fish
out of water. I have an alien mouth
with the ghost of a fragmented tongue.
So many of my syllables my ancestors carried
on their backs as they slipped through the cracks
of blurring land; I have long belonged to a place
that has only existed in words to me.
An abandoned house plundered and nobody
dug out the bones in the garden and
a shrub wilts out of it. So much of
that house is my body and still,
I push every skeleton into the backyard.
This time, no shrubs grow, and people know.
Are you a person or are you an echo
of all those who came before you?
I would love to tell you how my skin itches
as if gasoline in the shower; how it feels like
the heritage of men breathing down on women
in my family, setting scalps on fire.
Ask me anything but never ask me
who the 'you' I refer to is; I don’t know,
and I’m scared that I never will.
All of this silence in the smoke curls
into my gut and lives there; you know
I’ll never jam a fist down my throat
to pull you out through my teeth.
