In my history, I was bones eating paper
or I was paper eating bones. Semantics.
I lived in a narrow house;
I lived with a man who said
You fucked up your own life, who said
I could never love someone so heavy.
The place was brick on brick
with iron grates covering the windows—
rowhouse cage, South Philly. I was learning
how some of us are made to be carrion birds
& some of us are made to be circled.
Somewhere in this education
I stopped eating. Held up my hands
to see if my bones would glow in the dark.
My boat name could have been
HMS Floating, Though Barely.
Meanwhile I had a passion for cartography.
Not leaving, just coloring the maps.
I covered all the walls with white paint, whiter paint, spiraling out—
a weather system curling over water.
I always drew the compass rose flat.
I was metal-blue, I was running my mouth
like a bathtub tap. A bone picked clean of particulates.
Everything has some particular science.
By its nature, a vulture can’t
be a common field crow, for instance.
Look at the wings, look at that hard
mouth, look at the feet.
When I tell my history, I can’t leave out
how I hit that man in the jaw,
that I wasn’t good at mercy,
that eating nothing but white pills & white air
made me unchartable—
I can’t skip to the end just to say
well it was fragile & I smashed it
& everything’s over, well now I know things
that make me unlikely.
What am I supposed to say: I’m free?
I learned to counter like a torn edge
frayed from the damp. That’s how I left it.
Leaving the river, leaving
wet tracks arrowed in the brush.