The Poetry Living In My Skin

I am trying to give these poems a home

I am sometimes too afraid to house them in my body

they demand to be brought into the world

their labour, intensive

they have no concept of boundaries

what is mine is theirs

the mind is theirs

they mine what is theirs

I don’t know how much of me is me

and how much of me

is simply poetry

I house these poems

in flesh walls, a mortal barricade

there is so little

holding them all in

I cut myself the other day

and bled metaphor

all across the kitchen counter

If they decided to leave in the middle of the night

morning would have me staring into the mirror

a stranger to myself

a foreign woman

absent of all the things that made her feel like starlight

I sometimes fear giving all these poems a home

but fear more,

the kind of woman I would be without them