Inflation vs. Yield to Maturity
In the mirror of my bathroom,
I can see the absences more than
Anywhere else.
The fluorescents show me I am shrinking.
Shrinking by numbers, by hands, heart and brain.
All tick down like the new year's day clock, the count down until nothing left
Of me remains.
My skin my eyes my brain doesn’t fit anymore, like someone else’s patch jacket
With fraying at collar and sleeves
I wear it with it’s scent of perfume and runes, punched holes and white fault lines
All the same.
I can feel myself slipping
Slipping
Slipping on the oils and the creams and the words that keep me numb and ageless and beautiful
That remove the scars and stars of creation from my body
the crosshatch of destruction on my arms
Some other animal’s fats to prop me up.
Look at me in amazement
The spineless woman,
Shrinking by the day with a swollen heart.
Ventricles like vestibules where my thoughts must
Sit quietly.
Buried in blood and viscera
And sinew like something caught in the teeth of a wolf.
Small like a cavity
Small like an after dinner mint
Small like the snuffing of a candle wick.
I shrink until I cannot tell you what my shoe size is,
Stutter in case I’ve misremembered
The definition of a word
That I know I knew
before.
Shrink can mean doubt
Doubting is as cloudy as milk glass
Shrinking is realizing
Quietly.
Your milk glass is still in the garage.
Deviation of the plan
You still take up too much space,
Less color less taste of the words
You used to know and love
This is a happy place.
I’ve never known a happy place
But they tell me this is one.
And I am shrinking.
I don’t have enough left to wonder.
Flowers grow in the year and I can understand why the first woman
Chose a barbed wire fist of a lobotomy
Eve chose an apple.
Ripe and plump and heavy in the hand.
I have chosen the opposite
The ignorance
Not a seed to plant or grow
The womb of a brain but of oblivion.
Of space-time and the blacklist Kevlar sheets on my bed.
I chose to shrink.
I chose this.
No tears Mother, I lay in my own bed of flowers that have also
Lost their minds in the wind.
I keep the scars of where
I have cut my limbs
Like other mothers keep locks of hair and baby teeth
Small memory boxes of what I had to lose
what I never realized could be taken.
All too happy
All too eager with the knife.
All too eager to amputate hoping to fill some
Jigsaw if just one more
Part was taken.
I may have pruned too much
Dad I may have snipped the buds
Daddy my roses may never grow again.
I am shrinking the way sticks bundle in the winter.
Nothing but a heavy heart and a soft brain rot
Pruning my family tree with such precision
I shrink by losing my
given name or who I was
When it was printed on my birth certificate.
My mother my father
My multitude of ancestors
Shadow of headstones and missed calls and always lies
Mom I cannot remember your face how it creases
In confusion
I've burnt mine off with bleach and a butane lighter
Can you still see me?
But now the final act
The time comes when I am happy with the shrinking
The smallness of me.
I feel as though I could slip through an open door without
Warning and never make the sound of a heel on a welcome mat.
I was womb-born
My given name flippant chosen
From my fathers family pool.
But now I have so many names I am shrinking but referring to me
An inverse relation to each other like a financial chart
I pretend to know how to read.
I get smaller as my names grow
Like seeds so I should know
Believe and show that my shrinking was a holy gift from a man
Without wings.
The gift of Mother
Of wife
Of “love of my life”
Of lover and cook and whore and baby
So many names but no body to carry them no ribcage or spine to shoulder
The weight of so many letters
So many exclamations,
Just neutral colored clothes and a veneered smile and
And
And
and skin like ash that blends into the background.
And this is the end
I stopped growing when I was 13
Stopped shrinking when I was 29
And stopped asking “why” a long time ago.