Amy Poague

PULLING YOURSELF TOGETHER IS PSEUDOSCIENTIFIC

Reconstituting the curling memory of my smallest, youngest hands
can feel like a connect-the-dots-with-a-real-pencil problem--

yet a friend describes a healer
using energetic stitches, sewing up her own facial wound

with invisibly wending love.
The concern I have:

the world would like me pulled together,
provides only suture thread.

This enfleshment-of-all-others requests a smile--or else--
but my lips are already loosening to fragments

inside the paint-by-numbers of their tremble.