i'm eighty pounds down and my skin is loose.  shales of empty casing hanging from my pelvis, upper arms.  

what will i do with it now?  

it is still excess, still too much, still my same old problem.  

hangs, folorn, from my frame, not sure how to be.



that summer i shop in stores that have never been mine to walk in to.  

it is entering a portal to a world i've only ever circumnavigated,

skimming round flesh-toned mannequins posed for the beach, the city.

wondering if pretty prints and flattering cuts can exist beyond a size 8.


bikinis on the rail threaten the illusion that i am slim and toned.  

their gaping homages to the idea that showing a little,
just a little
flesh, is the sexiest way a woman can exist, bring about a conundrum.

they will see.

they will see that i am still not it.

i gave my confession down at the beach.  tide out and salted heart.
i sold it to a man in neon boardshorts
with a surfboard clamped under his armpit.
chalk pillars and a congregation of seagulls
fighting.  conversational scraps.
an isthmus that leads in to the water
before it backs down.
we go.

i spilled it all, my guts, my broken guts.
vomited them up on the pebble cast.

there is something about the gait of the sun as
is it turning away from our sky-
soft and low-
that brings it out of me.

anne sexton wrote love letters to my soul
long before i was conceived.
i think she knew the ways, all the ways, in which i'd suffer, before i did.
because it's a tale as old as time; you profit off my soft heart
and i consider death, always, as the solution.

my mother suffered in the same way,

                    as did hers, as did hers,

and hers, and the anger has nowhere to go but in to our marrow
to exist long aftet we don't.

we birth it in new girls, beautiful new girls who are worth more than the currency
of how they can serve others.

i wanted to be different, i really did, anne.
the nuance of your long nights and painful days was not lost on me.
painted a temple in the language of supressed women
for me to see-
split at the ventricle to become the mother, the daughter, the *** goddess, the poor browbeaten housewife.

and all i do is crane my neck and admire it all, eave to eave.

there is a gold lighter on the kitchen counter.
it doesn't mean anything
but it still burns with the heat of the last time it
was alive.
i pocket it.  i will try it later, when i am alone,
and watch it's smoke curl in to the crevices of the endless sky.


outside there is a dais and my family are spread across it like a luxurious french tapestry.  
it is fraying, though.
or maybe it always was.



i am colder than i was here, last year.
every spring we gather to remind each oher
that we should see each oher more, shouldn't we?
i am planted in this polite, vacuous soil of words.
a bulb submerged, fat and waiting in the earth.
i am waiting to grow.  to turn my face up, and away.
last year there were more of us, i'm sure;
but i can't recall the names
faces
of those that aren't here.

we are measuring our decline like an hourglass-
with each new year we are one less, one less.

I miss my freedom within your absence,
when I stretched between the memories.
Now I'm stuck between the moments,
my eyes tired from believing
your arms were safe for me to sleep in.