I open my window and toss my hair to the trees.
Someone told me birds use hair to insulate their nests.
Google says it’s harmful, but the birds and I have an understanding:
they won’t be strangled, and I won’t be stranded.

All I do is shed;
flesh hangs off bones like someone else’s dress,
I put on jewelry then take it off, hoping the fool’s gold won’t crumble
in my wallet. I’m sure I’ll self-immolate
if earring-backs and claw-clasps
keep licking my skin.
I shed hair and thighs,
guilt and fingernails, doubt and light,
until the world is full of me and I am full of nothing.

I gather my hair from brushes and shower drains,
pluck it from elastics and carpets, slice it out of vacuum rollers
with a box cutter, roll it into a tumbleweed in my palms.
Then to the window, where I drop it onto crabapple branches below.
I want the robins and starlings and sparrows,
the heaven-sent cardinals,
the crows I tell my secrets to,
to build a nest with my dead parts,
to make a home from the parts of me that couldn’t hold on.

Midsummer,
the worn-out end of June brushes against the beginning
of July and I’m wearing shorts to work for the first time in years.
I’m reading fiction in the sun, writing down my horoscope,
pretending I’m not a hostage to that first week in April
where he hurt my feelings, and I just hurt.

All I do is patter;
my hair drips to the floor in long, black rivers,
my aura drips down my back like a gas leak,
I think about how many trees I cut down to make myself,
and I think about birds falling asleep
in a haunt that’s made of me.

Losing my hair, losing my patience—
legs thinning, heartbeat skipping,
eyes squinting like commas, mouth tensing like a fist,
fingers like pitchforks reaching up from the grave,
skin like an avocado rotting on the counter.
All this losing, at least I’m helping the birds.

Words come and go with no consequence,
I buy dumb **** online and write poems without any soul,
I imagine a life where love is a faucet that drips through the night,
and I dream of him with long hair and daisies in his teeth.
My writing doesn’t pinch, my feet don’t tingle,
I just knot phrases around each other like tangled string lights
with half the bulbs burnt out, and it’s fine to say things like that.

I’m on a losing streak, but the birds don’t know it,
they tend to their babies, they sing to the dawn.
I can shed my way across summer like that was always the plan,
like I wasn’t born to ache, to be left gutted and graceless and wondering.
I wasn’t made to be love-bombed or pulled into trench warfare
after being invited to a picnic. I didn’t want to hold the gun,
but he was screaming to pull the trigger, and then my skirt was ruined.

I can leave my body in the grass and my hair in the trees,
I can write dry poems and feed them to the wind,
I can leave a trail of me through the trees like I was never there,
and when I find my way back, only the birds will know the difference.