I fail to burn her away
with the heat of sensation.
She persists through a dogma
of memory that defies rejection,
running in my blood like a hot wind.

She is a hand that spans eight
hundred miles with fingers that
cut into my dreams in the dark.
She says I am hers always,
her soil heavy in my blood.

Can you bleed out your memories?
Can you cut out the selves
you no longer recognize?

There is a memory like vapor.
I smash two fingers between
the latch and the sliding door
of my truck as I rush to return
to work under the steel gaze
of the sun.

My fingernails are pieces.
My nail beds seep.
There is blood on my truck and I
bleed my fingers out on the ground.
My blood maps my internal geography
and it courses towards her.

Now I trace our passive geometry.
I have always been a child of the
circle and so we are caught in a
dance around a moving center,
an orbit around a black sun never
meant to be seen.

Will she always be part of me?