Thick Skin Doesn't Work Anymore, and: The Text I Will Not Send to My Husband, and: It Isn't Only Crime Dramas That Remind Me How Connected We Are

Thick Skin Doesn't Work Anymore

I want to be transparent and translucent.I want you to see my heart beating on the out-side like those pages of Britannica,one plastic leaf lifted offand finally everything—lung, heart, vasdeferens, spleen—pulsed there in sunlight.I imagine we can intertwine. These Californiaredwoods, using their roots to holdeach other, nothing flowingbetween in and out so that even missingspace big enough to drive through, theystill reach higher than anythingaround them. If the wind catches oneand pulls it to the ground, they knowwhen to let go. You say you can't imaginethe sound, a crash you think, but I wonderif it isn't more a sigh, a slow releaseonto frond-softened ground. I'd liketo let go like that.            Or maybe what I really wantis to be like those mushrooms growing some-where north of here that emerge to gatherfood and air for what's beneath. Maybe the largestfruiting body is you and me, that boy we passedstumbling down the street, that woman who told usabout this forest. Maybe it's us, in an airplane, howwe all breathe the same air until the cells we've sloughed onto our seats enter the babyscreaming in the back row, pulling all of usinto her lungs while we swallow her screams.

Note: The poem's title and first line are from Viola Davis in an interview with Brené Brown.

The Text I Will Not Send to My Husband

Here's your fucking purpose, to learnhow love lives in the world, what's in front of you,what's stayed, but he keeps looking outsidelike it's one of those boxes he brought homefrom Baghdad, you have to find the trick to openit, working your fingers, using your handsto push and push and pull until you're readyto crack open the life you've made insteadof trying the most obvious twist, fingers spreadthe slightest motion and then the whole worldspinning there in the smallest space.Krishna's mother scolded him for the butterhe'd taken without asking and found thatit wasn't the butter he'd swallowedbut the whole world, galaxies spinning outof his mouth, bathed in blue.

It Isn't Only Crime Dramas That Remind Me How Connected We Are

I know how much of ourselves we leave behind when we leave:fingerprints, hair, pieces of skin, spent matches, spit swipedfrom the side of our lips, snot dried and scattered behindlike breadcrumbs. I left a silver hair on the black leather seat of myrental in California last week so even now that I'm thousands of miles awaysome dead part of me remains, and somewhere under a marble bathroomvanity, my fingerprints linger in Dakar, Dar es Salaam, Almaty. The saltfrom the tears I cried years ago when I left France mixes maybe with the stones,maybe in the river. So much of me has been left, I'm hardly myself.The laugh of a stranger down the street, the cries of geese dropped over mein the fall announcing their turns, the sound of my son's cries as we walkedhim through nights when his brain could not settle him to sleep. StillI pretend that I can leave you, imagine some home where I mightlive alone though my new black skirt exhales the taste of you.