How invincible I think I am with this lung
full of air, longing for wings
as tragedies crawl over my bare skin
and fall into tenderness.
I can’t write with my back to the door
until I fill the bright gaps of light
in the frame with a plastic wrap
that could smother a tick
and put an African mask over the peephole
to scare the phantoms away.
Because in poems I am naked
as the day I was born
and someone contracts salmonella
from cleaning a chicken and smoking
a cigarette simultaneously,
inhales the bacteria wriggling
in the soft colorless skin
directly from its filter as she slices
though a thigh and the microbe goes
rummaging through bronchioles
like a disapproving aunt.
I don’t want to be rummaged.
I have not lived with myself long enough
to grasp anomalies,
how if a baby’s face
does not form in the womb
between two and three months,
it never will. I am wide open enough as it is,
a white hungry color, pores filled
with the microscopic kernels of heartbreak,
leaving only small openings for light.