After the Full Moon, an Egg Cracked OpenAlone on the boat deck I read the falcon cannot hear the falconer. The sound of water lapping against the boat, the sound of memory erasing itself. Below deck my mother cooked bacon, my brother sung a 50-cent song to himself. My father was silent, the dog snuggled in his lap, a whimper away from sleep. Men in white t-shirts approach us on a zodiac. There were no falcons. Italics From The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats. Self Half SeenThere is a way to be alone, that used to be a part of me. I was made of solitude, mangos, and wind through the hole in the eaves. I never meant to meet my lover. The person I was before, wild only in her late night sleeplessness and coffee drinking ways. That first winter was so cold, everything we had thought about ourselves was irrelevant to who we were becoming. Between the Laundromat and the Nail SalonThe stranger digs her elbow into my back. I am in pain and paying for it, the shoulder muscles click and pop. Unbalanced, she says, the Russian of her accent, rich. As a child I imagined massages to be pleasurable, the kind of luxury my mother would never reward herself with. I only pay for one when migraines make me retch, my shoulders roped together by invisible strings, knotted like an abandoned necklace, my old landlord managed to untangle while talking about advanced mathematics. My husband tries to loosen the tightness sometimes but he’s too attentive to my pain to make headway. I let myself gasp with him. With the stranger my lips are sealed, my fingernails digging into my palm sometimes, invisible under the blanket. A way to redirect focus. The pain I give myself, always the most manageable. When I first figured that out at nine, I bit a canker sore into the side of my own mouth.
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