2.
When we were young, you were a dictator in plaid skirt, bruises on your knock-knees. You fell from trees to incur pity & mammalian warmth. In another room, your older sister played Rubber Soul by The Beatles because she loved impressing her friends that she was so up on everything. You drew a line. As long as neither one of us crosses it, you said more or less years later, then this will remain a cold war with frozen eyes & under-appreciated strategies. I imagined that line as wider/a potential no man's land. I entrenched myself there for decades. Even after Dylan lost his voice. You wounded me with a stray bullet that was a word. I composed for my wounded self elegies in French. I told my bleeding self that the world was full of witches & blue skies & the several layers beyond. I buried myself beneath the floor that was the ceiling over your caffeine-addicted parents who never believed that corpses could float.

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