I am done being sturdy, of bones.
I braid the small billow I am.

I assume nothing. Not the whole day
idle as wine in the glass. Not the heart,

a flounce of took roses. Not even
elegy, a metaphor for what.

Once the world was a womb
where I broke my throat with

trying to say. My mother’s blood
was my blood running beads all through

the garden, while the body took on
a crossroads’ weight. I opened my palm

for the first time: sight. Polluted
with the stigmata of briefly alone,

pressed like lilac in an unthick book,
an aspirin in the mouth of pain.