it is helpful to pretend that ownership
is the antonym of loss that we own anything
becomes a fiction if the weapon is cruel
back home we all know the story
about the woman whose house wallpapered & warm
scrubbed white & gleaming caught the eye
of the president’s wife & still furnished
was taken away or the story about [ ]’s body or
[ ]’s body or [ ]’s or mine
as a child i would sit for hours in tepid bathwater
& play at falling in & out of myself spread the fingers
of my hand & think [how do i know this is my hand]
& then the hand is no longer mine the face crooked
in the water no longer mine the form burnished by
fingerprints by teeth evacuated & no longer mine
once i fainted in the front row of a twigs concert
& lost my place when i woke i’d been moved away from the stage
& cursed my dilapidated body longed to discard it
& watch the show from above once i fainted
on the subway platform & arced into the dark track once
in a patch of greenery by the nile during a game
played with my cousins where we pressed at each other’s
throats until the body folded & came to a sensation identical to blinking
swift darkness then waking in the soft black dirt
to the reddening sky above scorpions shimmering
the sparse grass my body a house i could depart & return to
body an unlocked door body my small & failed container
[how do i know this is my hand] the story continues
this way the woman whose house was taken said nothing found another
hung curtains & beat the carpets & peeled the plastic
from two brocade sofas & installed her children
in their rooms & sank her body into a chair & the president’s wife
came again to call touched her fingers to the walls