All night she sifts torn
paper into garbage bags,
careful not to leave
a trail of names or living
places. Hard enough to be
the one passed over.
Hard to be the one whose face
becomes easily mistaken
in the bland light that pours
through early trains. So
she doesn’t want to hand over
the secrets of her middle
names, the passwords to
her childhood. Once,
when she was very ill, the elders
shouted a different name
over and over her fevered form.
They embroidered its ugly
syllables on face towels
and pressed them to her brow.
Somehow her soul knew then
to crawl into its quietest
room, the one she still
retreats into on hearing
winds shift and grasses
lengthen into shadow,
on hearing demons inspecting
for hiding places in the earth.
In response to an entry from the Morning Porch.