Breadcrumb #303
MEENA ROLDAN
These hands are less
than the sum of my hands.
These words are less
than the sum of my mouths.
For my body has been occupied
by a marauding colony of silkworms.
Don’t be misled. I am tumbling
somersaults through this exfoliating high
with my vacant eyes and fingers, revelling
in this great hibernation, but
my mind took the last train hours ago.
I might never have known. How
the wires crossed and gave a dead man
breath. So let me be grateful. Let me
thank the gods. Not for luck,
but for true friends with real spines,
and quick tongues that proved a
lifeline I wouldn’t have known I needed.
We might never have known. How
we carried ourselves home. Up stairs.
Through halls. Like crazed puppet
dolls. The neighbors suspicious of our
good times. One just rolled her
eyes under the sheltered logic of
‘who would drug you without
raping you?’ So, let’s be grateful
for a job half done. It could be anyone.
We might never have known. How
we lost the day in a cup and our lives
in a balance as thin as morning,
as fragile as these flashes of his
sinister smile as we sunk into the worst
and worst that lasted for days.
Charcoal eyes and cold sweats.
Where all is the same. Repetitious
horseflies replaying circles above a flame.
The worst isn’t that I can’t breathe,
that I can’t hold food in my teeth,
that days later my skin is still green
and I still can’t sleep. It’s not the
I-told-you-sos or shoulda-knowns.
It’s not the bruises and tears in my jeans
and gaping hole in my memory. No.
It’s this animal unleashed. This feral
body inside my body that came out
to play when he put us to sleep. This
carnivorous corpse. This lone wolf
risen from slumbering sheep. This
Venus trap around my neck and stones
ready to throw. Now tell me, where
is there room for this creature to grow?