Forgetting is a privilege I won’t indulge this time. There is plenty to excavate, but I won’t. Once I thrust my hands into the wet flesh of a plum and got dark fruit under my nails. It took weeks to get the stains out. Every day of my adolescence I prayed to a god I only half-believed in to disappear. Felt sinful to take up so much space. Thought the holiest thing I could be was gone. Now mind you my hands still shake when I bathe in perfumes and dress in my finest, I’m still not crushing it, Haven’t turned the pill of my pain into powders yet, Still don’t understand the mechanics of swallowing it, Still don’t even know what that will do. But this is the age of expanding, This is the age of blooming and knocking over valuables with my petals. This is the age of volume and depth, When I am beholden to no one and can feign ignorance for what the painted glass was even worth. I want to remember this year by the mouth of it, I want to know it by tongue. The heart shudders and gasps, Collides and collapses, A bird in an airport, A bird in an airport, And I cup it in my hands as it beats and it thrashes, A wild thing long since jailbroken from its cage.

Loving you is a dream from my childhood. Your body is the shooting range my father drives me to in his all-black pickup on Sunday morning. He’s never taken me to fire guns but in the dream I am ten years old in overalls and he presses a finger to his lips with a smile. Don’t tell your mother. My heart is the loaded gun he hands me when we get inside. It’s a rifle that fits perfectly in my hands with a trigger I am terrified to pull. My lower lip trembles but he tells me that weaponry runs in the family. As if knowing that your imminent destruction is hereditary makes the recoil hurt less. If my mother loves like a gardener overwatering a cactus, My father loves like a trained assassin. Perhaps I was doomed to destroy you— To drive a bullet straight into your chest cavity and try to clean the scar with enough water to flood a greenhouse. In a harshly lit kitchen on South Orchard Street you tap your beer bottle to my wine glass— The better to dress your wounds with. The backyard is dark and people are drunk on perceived remedies, So intoxicated that they fire into each other and plan on blaming it on liquor in the morning. I wish my musket was alcohol’s fault. That it wasn’t hardwired into my circuitry from before I knew the word for “gun.” When you kiss me, my hands sweat on the trigger. Something goes off inside me and I mistake it for fireworks.

I am the best thing that has ever happened to me. I am the most famous person I have never heard of. I call a girl better at healing than I am and tell her that I have learned not to love anyone who refuses to meet me where I am. I do not know where that is but I hear it’s lovely. All I know is that it’s far. I wake up and start walking. The morning is quieter than expected. Like I slept through a hurricane, Clean streets still dripping, windows blown out. I don’t recognize any of it. On the way to myself I encounter a baker’s dozen of impostors— I stop them all and ask where I’ve seen them before, If they come here often, If they have any recommendations. As if they know me. As if they could a hazard a guess at my hazardous taste. They get good at camouflage. I walk a crow’s murder of miles before I notice they’re all still beside me. They ask questions bearing answers they are not prepared to hear. They ask to stop for gas and pads and potato chips. They ask if we’re there yet. They ask who I am and why I look so old and why I look so familiar.

i. Sometimes, the apartment stairwell back-lit, hallways laid bare for miles. The woman next door presses her palms to the floor in gold-light, feels for pulses below, comes up empty every time. Night, and the dead dogs humming. This used to be simpler: the glow and pulse of the tongue, my mouth as wide as this room and just as empty.