& my mother takes me to the
supermarket so I will stop crying.

In moth-drowned morning
she is singing — what’ll I do? without you?

the June rain knocks bullets down into our hollow
car. Through the ritual silence of the pedal brake,

I confuse transmission for omission. Let me drive right
through her, hear the bones in the trunk rattle out

cautionary tales. Outside, a thread of silence
pulls out of my throat, ties a knot around the

deadened sky. A singular nerve unspools itself
from my neck. Another unravelling suspended

in a cascade of rain. Yesterday, a photo of a younger
me. How she was growing into a mooned face,

crescent mouth sculpted to sink into a girl’s thigh,
a rope of saliva palmed into a skywire lifeline.

Last summer, a girl tried to kiss me, a victory stolen
in-between the splattered bugs on the car windshield.

Their deaths all domesticated by my hand-tailored
rebirth. In the distance between me and her, a hole

-punched wound of a girl drunkenly stumbled out, rerouted
our veins to accommodate for the wasting bullethole.

Today, my mother tucks an orange into the grocery
bag. She kisses my forehead, says that I take

everything too seriously. Her jaw twitching out
a heartbeat. & between aisles of bitten

sweet soda, I unbutton my mouth into a sheet-white
envelope, mistake every set of empty arms for an

invitation. My girlhood sets into a car-made wreckage.
I stop myself from deveining my body, I cleave out

safety in the glovebox: my girlhood
a carnal wreckage.