Have you ever slept on an airplane?
What I mean, of course, is —
have you ever slept in one place
and woken up in another?

Have you ever been a child
and believed in teleportation,
if only because you fell asleep on the old sofa
and were carried to bed in weary arms?

What I’m trying to say is,
have you ever changed states?
Have you ever been a person,
and become a memory?

Have you ever opened up an old box
of photographs, and found that you
remember places, but not people?
All those people in the background are just…

people in the background.
Have you ever broken down?
Like a car stalling on train tracks —
have you ever cried when only night can hear?

I suppose what I’m asking
for is validation. Recognition
that I’m not the only liquid-being
trying to fit myself into a tall glass.

I have done and become
all of these things, and now my body
is a jigsaw of memory
trying to fit back in the box

without disassembling myself
into little parts —
like doing so would make me
the in-between, the part of the movie

that everybody sleeps through.