Dress Form

Myself I'm like a dress my mother made me, a fabric self split open with a sigh as I grew and—bewildered or proud or full of rage—patched with nicer material than we'd had before. I got the sense it was all wasted on me. But a needle's sharp to pierce, is itself pierced—so as to sew like I was taught. Like I learned: no dress could ever be beautiful or best if it had me in it. I was the stain in a place we couldn't fix. Having fallen on a slicer of some kind. Double-seamed, scabbed over, a new body pocket in the pattern. How to stitch up that wound right into the clean vertical rip in some on-sale flannelette? I'd never again be cold. Skin's holey not holy. In mad winter alone with drink, I think: tattoo needles don't use thread but ink to mark a place in this ever-moving skin and that wound is ornament. But who needs a mark to know what's marked? I would pray to the dark in the dark. But what did I ask for, what did I know to ask for? Nonfatal wounds: they're there when we die, deliquescent, vibrating like a drum skin just after each beat moves off. A part of music. A way a body keeps time, is time's keeper, vigilant till time up and goes to find another body. Another's warmth and shelter. Or related injuries. Anyone who hurts another was hurt that same way, so how far back behind our backs do we go to finally find the first hurt; whose finger points to say, "You! You're the one who god knows why started a cycle of unending pain," to someone's child in short pants? A baby just torn a hole in her amnion swirl? And what of me? I can't tell where my flesh meets the rest of me, ragbag full of rags, shot full of holes but that's just the way cotton and silk and everything I said up till now looks when it hits the air and is cried on. I'm so inside out I evaporated entirely already as August does, my actual dress shredded at the seams— unsalvageable. Who would ever love me like this? And just like that, I stopped thinking about it. I agree to meet you at the ferry heading to a place neither of us wants to go but both just said sure, I'll go...if you want! We should turn back, nobody said. Oh we should before it's too late, nobody said again, insistent this time.