It’s been 25 years and
my body is still a stranger to me.
Brushing fingertips feel like glancing trains
Adjusting my breast, I am caught off guard.
I do not inhabit my body
As I do my couch on Sunday mornings
As tomatoes inhabit the smell of summer’s night.
It’s been 25 years and I still
have the sense that my brain is dragging around a person
bagged and fighting to get free
inside, roving toward boundlessness.
My eyes like flashlights in the dark
catching restless just out of sight.
Each morning I whisper my hands awake
so they may collapse my frame
inward toward oblivion every night.
In another 25 years
may I lay claim enough to
wiggle my toes and pump my arms
as though I were alive
as though there were
no stranger
between our minds