Tracy May Fuad

I was sure that being in between meant being nowhere
I was sure, too, of scissors that could cut me off the grid

I hoped there was a key, but sure the void was serious,
virulent and spreading. I was sure alone, mostly.

Surely I was right on some accounts, a logic that left me
pounding. Was intimacy, by nature, grotesque?

Those intimate with me were divided. Where was I,
young and with my mother, running in the drenching rain?

Sometimes it is that which is most anonymous and cinematic
which is preserved, pressed between two panes and sealed.

The ambulance carrying my father at three in the morning struck
and killed a black bear. The beast wore death’s fur in my father’s place,

had to be hauled off the ribbon of road before the vehicle
could pass. I know there is a door in the exact shape of my body.

That when I go through it, I will know by how perfectly it licks the rim
of my perimeter. I am certain. On the phone, my mother told me,

island. That is where I’ll go when I am gone. Be certain,
I told myself, to be ready for the door when it opens.
 
 
**
 
 
Poem with Inflammation

And who am I to have such bold intentions?

I peeled myself off for the ship slitting the ocean to you

The sea’s big mouth yawning wide for me

We wept to keep it full

I keep making a door of myself and people come right through

A crowd erupting behind another door or was it jeering?

A thin line: I recognized that summer’s screaming as belonging to a crime scene

To embroider the pelt, it must be pierced at point blank range

There are rooms lit from the inside with no one in them and I have been one of these rooms

Again and again

A cousin coughing me out of my sleep all night

How pithy, my bald resentment of her body trying to heal itself

Of love’s repentant and evaporative act

The simulacra coo to my reducing scalp

So I live here now beneath a crown of pink synthetic flowers

For you: I scrape my face off the glass to wear my self today

I am so automatic

Scarf stitched to every crenulated thing I see with eyes

Encounters that sting as an acid bath must

She reached for the iron bare handed and exclaimed how could a woman ever set herself on fire?