Imagine my sedated limbs like marionette joints tangled in string and wood.
Meanwhile my head is the tilt of a dead dervish.
My jaw is like dentures.
All the science bearing down on me like sin.

Imagine my head is a carved pumpkin set in your lap,
the orange geometry of my face, the round hollow, the votive.
The crowded seeds, the seed colony,
the things we cut into squares and triangles because everything else is shapeless.
On the hilltop in summer, the electric guitar of the shooting star,
the way our parents speak quietly downstairs before we sleep.

Imagine your fear of the dark as a child.
If the night had shape it’d be round.
When I stick out my hands in the dark room, I feel the curve of it, the hips of it.
No wonder sex is at night.

Imagine my first smile, photographed.
Photograph my first smile as you would imagine it to be.
I smile like that even now, so that I am a continuous thing with shape.
In the shapeless night, my smile is a dark circle with squares.