There’s a body marching toward mine.

I can feel its breasts and stomach, hot

against my back. Its breath in my hair.

I accumulate bodies—my own.

The tattoo braceleting my wrist.

My earlobe like a pin hole camera.

My vagina, untouched. My vagina,

stretched. So many bodies treading

toward the others. And the bruises I conceal

with makeup and denial. The scars I inflict

on myself, and the ones I contort

with a mirror to see. I didn’t always know

we’d be joined like this—that I couldn’t

leave any of myself behind.

In Trisha Brown’s Spanish Dance

a performer raises both arms like a bailora

and shifts her weight from hip to hip, knee

to knee, ankle to ankle, until she softly

collides with another dancer. The two travel

forward, pelvis to sacrum, stylized fingers

flared overhead, until they meet a third woman

and touch her back like stacked spoons.

Dressed in identical white pants and long

sleeves, the dancers repeat the steps

until, single file, five women shuffle

forward—they go no further.

The dance lasts the exact length of Bob Dylan’s

rendition of “Early Mornin’ Rain.”

How many versions of myself pile

into the others, arms lifted in surrender,

torsos twisting to the harmonica?

But the dancers—I’m moved by their strange

conga line. A train of women traversing

the stage, running gently into a wall.

After the laughter subsided the crying kept after we held hands

and screamed and screamed and squeezed and screamed after

regret and shame and a single bush filled with speckled thrushes

singing redwing bluebird wood thrush on the wood of a branch

and forest thrush in the branches of a forest open pine

and after your mother refused to haunt your dreams after

you placed her in a wooden coffin and you sang like a blue bird

breast trembling beak open like a mother’s beak foraging feeding

offspring after lying on a clutch of blue eggs and after spring

after pining for spring ignorant of your grief and unraveling

with or without your blessing cool days and rain after icicles

crying and after you kept from crying and after you cried

there was no one left to protect after you blessed the demon

possessing you and after it left you were even more alone

a grandala calling and calling and after calling after your mother

a hole closed and a hole opened after that after all of that.

Heaven as Olympic Spa

Koreatown, Los Angeles

Gwendolyn Brooks stood stark naked.

I stared into her bespectacled eyes.

Ms. Brooks showed me how

to tend to myself by scrubbing dead skin

with a coarse wash cloth, rinsing

the body’s detritus down a common drain.

My flesh was taut, loose,

and dying. Even in paradise I was dying.

At first, this surprised me. Oh, the capsized

boat of the body, Wanda Coleman sighed.

We keep sailing, even when we believe