recitations

as if lantern flies belong here, but of course, neither do i, but how could i belong anywhere when i don’t even belong in myself? & then my breaths sound more like hiccups & recess field taunts & everything weighs as much as my hips, minus the bones & cartilage. the fat is what makes the meat so tender. & i’m rendered unsuitable for the class action lawsuit & the invite list & to be added to your address book. there’s a hole above my navel that never fully closed even after removing the jewelry all those years ago. i never funneled confectioner’s sugar down my throat in hopes i’d grow sweeter with a gooey center. i just used gluttony to wipe my tears. spring used to love me & she’d christen me, pulling me into something fledgling & velveteen. or lace whispering through the leaves of the lilac bush i can’t believe was cut down for its own good. i hold myself in shallow lungfuls & untied shoes still laden with mud, making prints in the white carpet & never undoing the button on my jeans. rain doesn’t purify anymore, neither does the shower drain. i cannot wash away the bits of me i broke in the recklessness of a youth aching away beyond what i can grave-dig out of a brain lightening the load of ten-year old with a knife pressed to her chest begging to be delivered from the evil corroding her intestines. how is it to be a figure holding less strife in adulthood than in the fourth grade? how is it to release? to relieve & relinquish & weep not for oneself? i am shallow in excessive shrouding, undressed, unbelieved, uncommon & regular & forgettable like the shadow stalking my every step. paperclipped to the documents shoved away in the folder in the back of the closet, filed & left for next year’s taxes. always in debt to a government robbing the children of a tomorrow worth staying alive to see. am i always going to sleep with a chest filled with fear & breast tissue & isolation brought on by the boot of a consumption i thought was already sucked out & discarded? am i always or never, forever & bound to salt? no high blood pressure, no inevitability. no more chaos strangling an inner voice back to silence. what is there left to say that i haven’t said a thousand times over, chanted in recitations, begging venus for a hand while mine stays glued to hers, our blood sticky & binding. endless twenty-one, trapped in twenty-nine. i made an enemy of time, a lover turned sour & bitter. a trope often lost in the antithesis & make believe. forgiveness, a theoretical possibility but unwoven & tangled in such a way, i could never find it in the mess i’ve made. so where does that leave me? where i’ve always been. sugar-coated in my mother’s arms & still starving at the base of the maple tree.