"You can survive on only ten inches of living skin.
While I count my birthdays, sticking white twist-candles

into yellow cakes, you grow a new layer of flesh
from your cambium, a ring of growth 1/100th of an inch..."

"My body remembers
traces, moments, inarticulations: 
the smell of cinnamon,
orange swirls, a kitchen's
witholdings..."

"An orange balloon on a white string
escapes from a little girl’s hand;  

it rises in a swimming motion 
like a zigzagging, a ripple, a bright..."