Half-life

ANNY TANG

i

here—sexless, sunken breasts & blind when you traced the name of a girl, honeysuckle sweet across my collarbone

in a glass dance of mirrors

I cut myself into the shape of her, fooled by how

I almost looked symmetrical

ii.

I lived in her like a nesting doll, squeezed into her larynx

& hips, suffocating: a ship in a bottle

iii.

wearing her painted smile through the airs of normalcy & you, fumbling for love between my ribs, never thinking to map the riverbeds carved on my cheeks or measure the fault lines along my equatorial wrists