Our bodies are small wars that we’re constantly trying to win.
Sometimes I have the desire to unroll a man like a map
and lay him out on the table to find where x marks the spot.
My mother told me this sounded dirty; I thought it sounded
like a love song. In middle school I knew a girl who
tried to hang herself with a noose made out of her own hair.
The ambulance came before she could kick the chair
out from under her. And those limbs looked so fragile, so white
and pale like the wings of birds.
But something tried to break them once, and she was never the same since.
Whenever I have trouble getting to sleep at night I close my eyes
and picture Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes,
Rilke and Lou Andreas-Salome
instead of counting sheep.
And instead of notches on my bedpost
for all the men I’ve ever slept with, I hang stars on the ceiling
so they can light my way in the middle of the dark.
The most beautiful word in the English language is dissolve,
because it means precisely what it sounds like.
A person can disappear completely
but still never be fully gone.
