i.
i always find a space for myself
in small places:

ii.
in my mother's open wounds,
there i dance with salt and lime
and my father's misplaced angers.

iii.
in the scratched frames
under the nails of an angry girl.
in between cowering sunbeams
i lick the walls clean of dust.

iv.
in the fifth page of thrifted book,
back when i was in love with bukowski,
i look at the stains of a summer day sin
and see a five-feet
egyptian sarcophagus taped with figures;
what is the hieroglyph for pity,
so that hathor takes me back to the tight spaces of her womb?
what is the hieroglyph for homelessness?
what is the hieroglyph for misplaced?

v.
i always find a space for myself
in small places:
in the holes of a tire,
in between discolored knuckles,
in desperate places where a body gives up
and wastes away;
there's a space for one more.

vi.
i always find a space for myself
in small places — they wait with such quiet patience
like a father to a prodigal child —
i always find a space for myself
waiting in small places,
it calls hauntingly, like a well-loved, familiar ghost.

yet i cannot come back.

i am too huge with sorrows now —
too full with wistful human bones.

i.
pluck the aching out of my ribs — one by one
as though they were teeth that had sunk —
latched themselves onto these bones,
until it is but a pile of bite marks,
a pile of mildewed flowers —
festering like sins, like punishment.
pluck each bruising bone,
some things belong to my chest.
some, to firelight.

ii.
pluck a rib,
make the sweetest, purest, brand new woman —
all lace girdle and nectarine lips,
stepping out of the outskirts of my skin
as i watch from the other side of an exit wound — the inner side.
maybe in another life, that can be me.

thou shalt not covet.

i close the window.
i zip the skin.

iii.
tonight, i kneel in a confessional —
screaming away all banal sorrows,
screaming away all banal sins.

pull the aching out of my ribs —
it's in its rawest just before the dawn.
pull the aching out of my ribs.

a corrupted sight
for awakened flowers. ringing church bells. hummingbirds.
oh, a corrupted sight.
and mornings will hear its aftermath.