she was spinning
for the thousandth time
and never fell once,
though gravity pulled at her ears
in circles around her skull,
and the ground yanked
at the corners of her eyelids.

she was blind
and couldn’t see the point at which
her heels rotated against carpet,
but she could hear the washing winds
that swelled inside her ears,

whose disembodied whispers
echoed out of her pearly eyes,

whose voices broke her knees
every time her head shut itself tight.

in the night,
she broke herself back open
to stop falling on an axis.

she peeled the whispers from her bleached skin
in succession,
replaced them in a wooden box,
and buried them under her damp sink,

where they crawled around

in the dark’s ink.