I feel so detached some days.
I am not who I was. I am not
the girl who walked those high school halls,
red lipstick smudges and sidelong rejections
of boys who didn't know the mess they were after -
I am her and I am not her; at the heart
of things, the real truth of it, yes
we are the same, but I now
would not say those things she said
or do those things she did, or think
even as she thought.

Detached from the past I am now wholly
freed from the fetter of past selves, free
of their guilts, their regrets, their desires;
I am floating, minuscule distances above the dust,
I don't belong in that skin anymore, I can't help
but feel itchy in it, wanting to claw my way
out of my own skin. I don't know
what it was that tied me to her before
and is now gone, I can't see
the ribbons of gravity that held me
to the surface of this luminous planet:
reforging those bonds is a task invisible
and out of reach, something I won't know I'm doing
won't know I've done until it's over -

and on it goes, the floating and the molting,
and I can't quite see the places
where my new feathers are coming in,
but oh God how they itch.