Everything is dead except you & I                 so let’s sit down together

somewhere along the edges where we can dangle our feet into the matrix.

Let me show you this brown coat that I bought one day when I wanted

to feel something more than just this body.

                                                                             So many things can be true

at once and yet none of it at all. I wanted to be something more

                                                                                                          so I became a writer.

I became a writer and wrote a sentence and made it true. What else is there to say?

I said I am a writer but what I mean is I am a daughter:

                                               a testimony of my mother in case she forgets.
                              I came to poetry because I wanted the truth but found instead a soft terrain to

            lay my body down on.

                              Some days I am only an echo                a sound bouncing off of something else

                              unable to hold on long enough to build a self.                                               
If a line is a moment in time then a whole poem is a timeline and so how many alternate

timelines have been written into existence? 
            I throw my body into open water and somewhere it is monsoon season

            on the island where we spent our summers             breath heavy with the scent of

durian we ate off of newspapers. 	And then again somewhere else:

            my feet pedalling a broken yellow bicycle            a blue sun beating down on my

neck            ghosts running wild through a wasteland in reversal.
            Now closer to home: a body, dancing. Strobe lights turning the singular into plural. 
On earth I was given clay and a self                    

and told to smooth it into something whole and presentable.                    

I looked through the telescope and saw                    

nothing except a needle point of light                    

coming towards me.                    

It opened around me and at the end                    

a door.