The Other Life

I wake up in the morning when it’s just the garbage trucks and a missed sunrise. I feed the birds, open a window and go back to bed. I am peeled. Not in the way you gently open a banana but in the way you dig a knife into a jackfruit and rip skin apart. Jackfruit is golden joy in mouth. Under the blanket is the smell of my night-body. I try to catch whiff of what’s happened, where I’ve been, what else I’ve eaten. My stomach is full, I’ve eaten for eight families, there was a feast. The other life is at the corners of my lips, its stone-moss wetness rippling a nervous joy in the rivers of my chest. My forehead’s creases ironed out. At my nose the heart notes of a perfume. As if I was seated between boughs of trees laden with blossom. The patterns on my skin, their shadows. I close my eyes and it seems right to hold me at my elbows. I’m weakest at my arms and these joints, I have a premonition they’d just snap into two if I don’t hold them close.