Shatter

I begin to dance
with fragments of glass
staring back and forth
so I cannot count myself.

I try to catalogue
all the little pieces
of me that have 
fallen along the way.
Fractions of a 
smaller self that
I cannot reconcile
with the women
who surround me.

Like a word repeated
over and over and over
and over and over
I become syllables
without sentiment
movement
without context.

I attempt to gather my 
soul into these skins
and remember the 
memories my freckles have
but they have scattered
to the four corners of
a foreign moon.

And I find it easier
to identify with the
caterpillar in his chrysalis
than the girl who
wore my eyes yesterday.

But she nestles,
that familiar stranger,
making a womb
of my left ventricle
and whispers to me
all the stories my mind
cannot remember.

She sits there,
my wild-haired fever-
dream child
and taps out the re
percussions
of a life she lived
in my other skin.