How do you put into memory what is physically present? They say the body remembers, but how does the memory form?
Every detail that is mine was once yours, too. The singular shade of brown my skin turns in the sun. Curls that are soft in the front and coarse in the back and wild and black and all over. You are in the heel of hands and the swoop in my back and the vein that runs from behind my knee across the arch of my right foot. You gave me the amber in our eyes. Legs that walk concrete, searching for earth. Hands that crave touch.
We stood shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, the same exact proportions, until you couldn't stand anymore.
They say beauty begets. That it incites replication. That this is what
They say that "beauty is truth, truth beauty," and this is the truest thing I know: I know this body is mine, because it was yours first.
October 2017