I am not a whole lot of things
but I am parts of so many.

I take what’s in my way
and sew it to my chest:

A sky a scent the pulsing of a river,
all collected and fumbled by my own clumsy

digits. A loop, a song, a dance I have done too
many times all decorate me in a way that perhaps

once left me bare and bizarre, strangely carved
around the edges and the sharp parts spelled my name

The tempo, the movements each so fast and wilting,
rearranged and rearranged and repossessed until I cannot

even recognize the me that I was after day a month a year
have all rolled behind me

Do you ever do that? Melt yourself in front of the mirror,
In a dark room when outsiderness seeps in through cracked

window frames and loneliness settles into your bones? Are you ever left
to scoop yourself up, a pile of things, an oozing semi-liquid,

semi-human,
used-to-be-fashioned-into-something-reasonable,

called-a-woman-but-is-now-just-unlovable?
People say they love me and I believe them I do I think they just

don’t know me they must love someone else I guess: a shadow,
the person I said I was yesterday before the collapse before

the puddle before the shards sliced my own foot and I bled
all over myself and laughed it off because Fajr time was folding in

and you can’t prostrate before God if you don’t have joints
to bend and the something face-like enough to touch the ground.