Middle school was
Running in the night under
The full moon black braids and
Dragonfly hairpins two soft-boiled eggs
in your pocket
You were bigger then
You only seemed to curl collapse
Into a word waiting
To be read as a sentence if only
they could see
The bridge you crossed the day
You stopped thinking in Chinese
Thought she not they
Your name becoming driftwood in an
Apple-scented sea and you
Are you Crusoe or the boat
he made
The day you discovered the pocket dimension in your locker full of bone spirits your teacher had asked you to explain the whole history of china to class, for the asian history unit. You stuttered. She had a kind face. The jade bracelet on your wrist the magnitude of the task the smallness with which they approached it everything discrete and /perfectly logical/ this that couldn’t they see the braids You heard a far away roaring excused yourself In your locker in your bones another hinge.
Your shame unlocked the door.
Bleached whalebone bed
Letters from those here before
you embroidered into the sky,
your constellations --
the yolky moon
Dripping distant waves driftwood
Becoming home for sand crabs and you
The bone spirits have taken an interest in you. In the morning you wake up heavy, their skeletons not quite aligned with yours - fragments of gossamer down in your hair, spurs against your collarbone they have found a home in you laid down anchor made of bird bone and your grandmother’s white hair and em dashes you are wearing them they are wearing you.
here in the underworld we tell
stories we wrote for ourselves,
and at night our bone spirits dance