Containment

I don’t need to

personalize my body

to feel like it’s mine,

she says and

 

Then you’re lucky,

I respond.

 

I wish I’d been

dunked in beans as a child,

hard uncooked beans,

so that I could feel

my edges,

my borders,

the places beyond which

I am no more.

 

Maybe then I would feel

easier

about being contained in so

odd a space.

Maybe then I’d be able to

recognize myself in smooth surfaces, to

understand that I am not in

everything and

everyone and

nothing at all,

that I,

like everything else,

end.