The Anatomy of Passing
The pavement gulps beneath me,
a black tongue licking at my heels.
I walk like a trespasser,
like a ghost who never learned
how to haunt properly.
The air reeks of iron and rain,
a hymn sung by gutters,
low and off-key.
Every eye is a loaded gun,
every glance a flare
hunting the cracks
in my skin.​
​
What am I? What am I?
The mannequins don’t say,
their hollow eyes
mocking me silently.
The streetlights hum their accusations.
I flinch beneath their fluorescence,
a creature dragged from its den.
Once, I dreamt of seamlessness,
of the world letting me pass
like wind through the streets.
Now I dream only
of vanishing entirely,
a wisp of smoke dissolving
into the throat of night.
But there are moments—
small, sharp as a pinprick—
when the world softens,
when I catch myself
in a stranger’s smile,
brief and unworried,
and feel, for an instant,
like the girl I was promised.
Still, the mirror waits,
its surface flat as judgment.
It shows not the girl,
but the scaffolding—
the stitches, the seams,
the work of building myself whole.
I tilt my chin,
paint a mouth that bites back
at the ruin.
I am still here,
a fistful of loose threads,
a hymn half-sung.
And when the blackness rises,
slick with its hungers,
it licks my face clean of resolve,
leaving me raw, unstitched,
a shoreline gnawed by tide.