Poetry
the impact of foreign bodies; the earth collapsing
A shadow bisects another, which is to say it enlarges itself
The body doubles what it cannot hold
I turned on the TV to drown out my heartbeat
This hefty crime: to obscure a dead insect with your body
Its flesh was weight inside my shadow
I dreamt of my embroidered pocket swollen in a deluge
I heard the clouds telling fist-sized lies
Illegible lung: for what do you []?
Inside an ocean wave, my heart is all treble
Rounded by the fog, I tumble toward the shore
Inside these borders
I have always been ashamed of something
/
Shadows migrate in small amounts across the house
A mollusk leaves a ghost in its path
I am trying to cancel myself out
Rub out: inherited stain
知足常樂, my mother says to me
So much of life I am trying to catch things before they are even falling
Grasping an interval of air: do I hold on for dear life?
I felt a vapor in my chest, a miniature storm—
Meanwhile the forecast outside fomenting
My mother kneeling in the garden
Leaning green capillaries away from the ground
Her broken sound: a tender seed
Inside my joints, a world was growing between the ligaments
I was standing there with my hands rounded
/
To name a weather system and call it mine
To be afraid to let [] have its space
How much of life is lived in embarrassment of a feeling?
I wrote letters to specters: how we are always longing
From the slow inside of sleep
I collected my fear like small delicate things
To save—rocks, leaves, pinecones
Inside the house, I look for smaller houses
My family’s trauma, a paranoia for being wounded
My mother repeats to herself all day, All okay, nothing wrong
History says, All okay, nothing wrong
How nice it is to close the door and forget
Marginal things: salty winds that erode the house
Holes in the ceiling dispersing structural debris
Heavy light at noon
I was tired of the stickiness of the world
Feeling slighted by the splintering window
Doorways that turn away too quickly
Instead: it rained heavily, and I wore the rain close to me
I let it infiltrate my boundaries
As if to say, The body is not a porous thing
/
Standing there with my arms outstretched—
The shape of the earth is a series of concentric circles
The meteorologists say a new category of cloud
And already I know how my body betrays
To crawl like an insect, to emit small barometric moans
Exile is something I do to myself: done to me
Violence sleeps with the humility of a stranger
Its bruises recall magnitudes of smoke
A body’s map, a family’s fieldwork
The weather full of ourselves, brimming, punctuating, leaking
Even the gravel hungers for faraway moons
Even the land moves in millimeters and fractions
Transplanting sky
I do not blame their trespasses
Underneath the contour of me the darkness is compressing like waves
/
In order to not be ashamed in a room
I keep my body as still as possible
To keep my unbelonging hidden
I wear a thick coat that covers both knees
I follow all the rules, snip all the frayed edges
Orbs: these hands I hold shut
Once I alighted at a bus stop in error, my face red as asterisks
Mistakes are the body taking up space
Once a stranger crossed my path, diverted my torso’s shadow
Tiny earthquakes, the way someone forgets to see me
Instead of waving my arms, I whisper into the air, sorry
Even the smallest things to an insect—
Even a slight shift in atmospheric pressure: in my dirty limb
/
There are corners of the house I avoid
Vowels of the house I do not break
I hear noises in the hallway, and my heart is anxious with stones
Do not vacuum over the uneven wood panels near the southern window
Pretend the spreading stain, like rotting mold, does not exist
An acorn drops to the floor
Currents of texture rattle me
To save myself from falling too far, I refused to move
To keep my fear wrapped in layers, I added curtains to the blinds
Nowhere is the ground more uneven than just outside my walls
Nowhere do the clouds enlarge more
Than the eaves inflaming my throat