I sit on my bed
It wails beneath my weight and I exhale
As if I were holding my breath all day
My shoulders drop
My eyes fix on the floor
A hat
That once belonged to my brother
Has fallen off a shelf
Exposing a ring of sweat and dirt
I cannot avert my eyes
I cannot pick it up

Once I was covered

By the weight of tattered cotton
In the quilt your mother bought you

By the pallor skin of your small freckled arm
And hands adorned with tooth bitten nails

By your chest curling around by back
And legs that got lost amidst my own

(Once I was covered)

Go down
Right in the pit
At the bottom in bile
Churning with anxious fever
Bowel

My fingers are stiff
My ring slides and shifts
Between my knuckles

The air is cold, arthritic even
My joints like dry elastic bands
My bones each one of them cold and lonely

I listened to your lips
Asking questions of a conch shell
Static
Silence
Not even the ocean

I wear the ring of a man I never met
Loose and slightly bent
On the third finger of my right hand
A garnet
My birthstone
And my mothers
And her mothers

They knew this man

His belt
His knuckles
His flesh

His breath
Soured by wisky and sticks of tobacco

Sickens me
The thought of it

Oh but how this
Gold band sparkles

I sit and listen to the hum of foreign voices
My skull rattling on the window
Staring
At the yellow
Lines of the road