Breadcrumbs

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?

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