Spillage

I wake up & I’m still parts;

officially nothing. 

 

I could tell you I was broken up 

cleanly, even halves, a creature

 

of sanitized cuts with minimal 

bloodletting. A lie of apparition.

 

It’s like my short stint as a waitress, 

that night I had to keep inserting

 

fresh white tablecloths under 

the prime rib to cover up the spillage. 

 

I, too: there are days so much of me 

spills out in thick, sticky red

 

that someone has to be called 

to contain it with fresh linen.

 

None of this answers the question 

of who will claim me. 

 

I’ve asked everyone: grandfathers, 

aunts, politicians, bureaucrats 

 

& their nation-states. Every time someone 

places a claim I crumble like goat

 

cheese again & we are forced to reckon 

with the possibility of error,

 

to hope for a factory reset. Ancestors laugh

in opposing cadences. Who will edit me now,

 

who will pluck or disentangle, 

decipher me all the way into the deep?

 

They say mixed like it all breaks down 

along a readable margin without 

 

curdling. A self 

predicated on exception.

 

All eyebrows 

& lucid dreams of places 

 

that never existed.