I am reaching into myself, never carefully enough, I
have never been one to keep my elbows off the table.
The glass of my body broke somewhere in between
the table salt & grief. I would hold my shattered body
up towards the breaking light, as if to say, “Here. Look.
Look at what I was able to stitch back together as the pieces
of myself flew apart from one another, as if in a dream.”
I cannot see the way my hands burned from holding
onto all of that grace. My knees buckled under the pressure.
No prayer could keep me from splitting at the seams
in the middle of the night. How it felt like a body falling apart.
How it felt like all of the times I spent falling
into the mirror, straining & aching to get a grasp of myself
while I performed surgery on the garish reflection
of my heart eating its way out. Margaret Atwood says,
“If you get hungry enough ... you start eating your own
heart.” Mine ate me.
What does that make of this hunger?