I’m choking on a fistfull of bones.                   There’s a skull
hidden deep in the back of my closet,
maybe in the abyss beneath my mattress,
maybe lodged somewhere behind my bookshelf,
that reads aloud all my past regrets
like bedtime stories.

I found the dried up teeth of my grandmother
on my vanity and used them like dice.
There’s a rib from my great aunt that I use
as a clothes hanger dangling on a hook in my bathroom.

When I was little the playset in my backyard
looked like tomorrow,
but weathered down and rusted, it looks
        like a mausoleum.  

There is a lock of hair on my bedside table that
is not mine, but hers, and I can’t help but
wonder if she wants it back.  Does she want it back?

There’s nine-year-old smoke in my lungs and
five-year-old iron around my heart.
There’s a wishbone branded to my liver
to signify the what if? and a
skull branded onto my chest to
signify the what is.

I learned not to trust so fully the first time I
nearly drown and how to be independent the
first time I learned to swim.
I used to want to be a “daddy’s girl” until I
realized what that meant.  The roses he gave me
for graduation went headfirst into the trash.

I have many things left unsaid.