Lay Me Down By Aimee LaFon

Ive been listening to voices these days
As I lay in bed,
I curl my collar to push my ears closer to
The space where I think they speak-
They tell me how to spell words that
I wanted to use when I was not awake
But I forgot them and they turned my
Name into an autocorrect suggestion:
“Lay Me Down”
I havent been sleeping, so I always open
The window to expose a screened in breeze
That I consume with my eyes- I sit, trying
To define the shape of a tree that has already drowned
In a sea that I cannot perceive.

Ive been holding onto memories of things that have already died these days,
And for some reason I hear doors slam at night,
Calling out the departure of a breathing pattern I once
Harbored. When Plato told me about Theseus’ ship last night,
I wondered if the battered parts of me that I have replaced
still sit in my gut’s graveyard
Or maybe they went their own ways, found a
Hospitable port-town that does not look like a glass-boned cage
Either way, they do not belong to me anymore.

Ive been trying to fit into a bed that is too short for my legs these days
My feet hang over the edge, peeking from my well-worn blankets
Until I withdraw into the shell that I grew myself.
I feed it with my old journals, letters that I wrote
To my first boyfriends, gluing something together
That still looks like the revisionist history
I wrote for myself, but when I glue them around my body,
The ink dissolves and breaks my language into
Nothing, and I am a sad turtle. I rescind it all,
Take back my love from my mother, from him, from her, from them, from you
To make a space where hopefully I will evolve into a body that looks like home again

These days.
I look at my hands and see skin
That has replaced the man I was.
Back then,
I was someone with a voice.
Right now,
I am opening the window,
And I am looking for a tree
Coiled
In sound.