Splinter
The face in the mirror strange.
Wax lips curling hopeful
not her lips
nor the eyes her eyes.
She is peeling away from the vessel,
slipping out of the skin.
Isn’t it curious
the body below watching the face in the glass?
How she smiles at the stranger
then splinters into shards?
So easy to splinter and fly away.
Now she is a sparrow, small and brown,
scratching at broken pieces,
a spider on the ceiling
ravenous,
many legged,
a goat scrabbling up and up chinks
in the wall.
Broken, ravenous, scrabbling
she collects the shards
and swallows them.
It hardly hurts at all.
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