2
Bleeding Fingertips
When I don’t know what to write or what to say,
When I don’t know what to do with my face or my hands or my mouth,
When my skin is itching under eyes and judgments,
When my body wants to go everywhere and yet go nowhere,
Shrink into itself, collapse inward,
Folding smaller and smaller,
Infinitely smaller,
A tiny box,
Gone,
But still I am here stretched and large over the heavy present and its eyes,
I pick.
I peel back the skin on my fingers.
I hook my nails under corners of loose skin and pull.
And when my nails are too short,
I bite at it.
I chew it off like a meal,
Like an rat’s raw meat,
Until I can taste my own fingerprints.
I rip off the outer layer and bleed.
I bleed somewhere people don’t check for bleeding.
I bleed where no one notices bleeding.
My therapist didn’t notice the bleeding.
They don’t notice the bleeding.
My fingers bleeding.
I lick the blood off my fingers,
Never let there be too much worrying blood
And it tastes like iron and salt and sharp, warm things.
Or I put my fingers in my pockets,
Bleed on the inside of my pockets,
Blot the blood out.
I pick the skin so bad my thumbs get covered
In raw skin,
Pink, fleshy, painful to touch
(Cont.)