acrobat. my anthology
An acrobat lunged from my mothers back,
Curtsied off the corset,
Strangled my waste.
I walked 10 lbs heavier, loosing posture like my grandmother-
With muscles knotting in rubber band tensions,
stretched to laugh— snap back to count my stretch marks on the ground.
My movements in mimickment.
autodidact, I taught myself to be an acrobat.
Soon her weight, like a ten tonne anvil embellished my life
Same as concrete in greenery jungles.
Solar flare to flammable paper-
She would crack.
Only for big men in big trucks to stitch her back together
with intoxicating tar & back-breaking gravel.
Mostly quiet, except when she’d talk out of turn.
We danced and ricocheted between every comment you ever gave me.
You said it half-heartedly, but never mind—
my mind pierced itself just the same.
I did not know then, but she loved to play with glue. Sometimes get high on the fume.
She’d stretch your comments to blue cubist canvases
She’d stretch your comments to languages you did not speak
May not even understand-
She’d stretch them long enough to fold into my rubber bands,
Like double-stranded helixes.
It hurt more than it should have,
defensive,
you said I was sensitive,
& I am.
Did you ever walk straight?
More than I knew I could,
But still I bend with the oscillations between your compliments
and good-looking-accolades,
hugs,
kiss,
Pink-skied sunsets,
That do not happen everyday.
So I would fold more than I’d learn to perch on my vertebrates.
Mountains form molehills, but more like
Fault from circumstance.
Deceivingly comfortable in her shadow, I could not know
that you were not asking me to make me worth you.
& fault, like a hangover, forces you into reconciliation of every wrong decision ever made.
Maybe that is why I felt so comfortable in an obtuse, un-human-like dark reflection of myself.
Strangled in tonnes, she grew fat.
I never liked cardio, but I was an expert-
my heartbeat metronome sounded like washing machine on a final, apocalyptic, rinse.
my breath a shallow puddle on stretch-marked grounds,
-except with all the symptoms, never once a runner’s high.
An acrobat, I began to know her.
Hear her, not just out of turn, but reliable echos on long-distance phone calls
Scattered rainbows on bedroom walls,
Hidden meaning in everyday messaging.
A shadow only when she. did. not. need. all. the attention.
Ten years-in she’d grown cocky,
We tussled in brave testaments to egos,
She engulfed me in gymnastic routines across misremembered memories and nostalgic how-fun-once-was.
I loathed her, as I learn to loathe myself.
My knees hurt, as running does to them.
My folding becoming a musical masochistic 90-degree bend into painful joints.
do you want to live like this?
Fifteen years later, autodidact
I taught myself to be a matador.
I see her, I win her, I fold to her, I ride her, I am her, I am not her. I am.