Sound lives at the border of light, and yet you only feel your heart beat. My mother says that’s how memory works.

After my night-light phase, I could only sleep with a bundle of plush animals. Nothing felt more permanent than pitch-black rooms, effigies of disappearance within arm’s reach.

The mouth contorts to an uncurled circle when it bargains. Five more minutes before bed is nonnegotiable, a nonstarter. The bends of our mouths morph, expand. Bodies always absorb more than they intend.

In elementary school, my teacher once called ‘suns’ the perfect palindrome. Identifiable from any angle. Everyone in the classroom wrote it out, spun their notebooks in circles on their desks. The day filled with redundancy.

My phone jitters with texts: Time heals all wounds / Just wait it out. We speak as if circulation will always run its course. But who will we blame when all our scapegoats go extinct?

On Sunday mornings I sit still, folding time like laundry.

If anything, Edvard Munch was a psychoanalyst. He always saw how life was sequenced: Despair before The Scream, tongues before the fire.

Finding blemishes on your face when you wake up is proof that disasters are authentic.

Mommy said the parts of the fruit we eat are called its flesh, my friend’s daughter announced before jabbing her straw into the side of an apple. Juice shot through the apparatus. Flesh softened with alleviated pressure.

A kiss, not of death, but of surplus, overgrown and full circle. A cannibalism: shapeless and undetectable.

Despite the blood, this poem is not an animal.

The logics of dimples, mushrooms in worship, touch of the stethoscope. We learned to depend on the rhythms of breath, the simplest ideogram.

I rarely question things already named. Devils were named after their blistering outcries. But recently, they began to bleed more. Many vowels refused to fit in their mouths. Even after their gums took new soundscapes, we still called them devils while requiems poured from their lips.

One intruding body becoming many inside the walls of its host. Not just the Trojans’ horse but all gifts from the outside.

Anything can be used for measurements. When I get home from work, I show you my hunger by opening my mouth as wide as it can go.

‘Young’ and ‘old’ only explain expectations. Ten years old: a young tortoise, an old dog. Obsessed with my own understandings of the world, I forget to talk about the years themselves.

On the other side of the crosswalk, the little green person who is me flashes urgently, wavering between existences. A church bell resounds. Children peel off strips of secrets to share in the yard. I cross the street, bookended by inevitabilities.