my stretch marks run like the liquid mother
of pearl of god’s
tears I’m aggrandizing because I’m still trying
to cope with how often
I scarfed a whole styrofoam boat of nachos smothered
in sure-sweet ground
beef and gluey cheese in my high school
cafeteria before finding
my solace in a bathroom stall graffitied
(no shit) with i ♥ jesus
my lord and savior and then I bit
down on two fingers
before shoving them all the way in
my throat like a quiver
of arrows I used to pretend I could swallow
fire and that’s what
I did every time I let my boyfriend
call me muffin
top or worse dumb I began to give up
parts of myself
to his names like barren stretches
of highways
to dead cops and lt. colonels why do we
capitalize
I and not mine why do we
capitalize I
and not you a friend’s ex-lover
paid cash
money to have some lesser star unofficially
named after
her but how many stars out there are called
Tracy the fifth
most popular name for girl babies
in 1970 sometimes
I’m re-astonished to realize I wasn’t alive
for every year
in history unborn until “Alone”
by Heart
held down the no. 1 slot on the American
charts sometimes
I come to a new place and feel I’ve been
there before
the way I feel when a date I write after
my signature
is the birthday of someone I once knew
but don’t
know anymore when I said a new place
I meant
a new stance of my body the way
my muscle and fat and
insecurities sit on my bones that day I’m told my backbone’s
gradually bending
into the letter S I wonder what makes
someone cast
an old lover’s name into the distance
of space if it’s
a gesture of the unrequited or else
a lightyear’s worth
of fuck-yous my body doesn’t stand
for anything
it’s a rigorous honesty I sometimes wish it told me
white lies my
body it doesn’t stand for anything I want it to
not
forgiveness or acceptance not the same
thing not even
the name I was given at birth the name
I come to