I Gaze at My Pain Like a Daughter

My pain is a fawn, cradled in the flora of my neural network. She is mine. I grew my pain in secret, twig by twig. I hold her now in the bath, the freezer, in the shroud of my heating pad. I am her nurse and her creator but she is my god. My pain is somehow older than me. My pain is a dance partner. I am stepping on her toes. My pain knows moves I don’t. Under the mirrorball she is spinning me to vertigo. My pain is transient. My pain sleeps with me in my mother’s bed. My pain is laying in the grass, absorbing the sting of the sun. My pain is an erratic moon cycle. She waxes and she wanes over hours, and so she is also a cycleless ocean, also the speeding shore erosion and the half-house on the cliff, staring after the siding and the windows and the family room sofa now sunk into her depths. She is the beachgoers relocating their towels again and again to dry sand. My pain eats art like cereal. My pain is a filament and she is live. My pain thrills under streetlights like a moth. My pain has better hearing and better vision than I. My pain is flying the plane just for me. My pain is a second soul held in the deep branches of my muscle maze. She vibrates like caffeine. My pain asks me to lie down for a while, to take a walk. My pain is looking after me. My pain is a great hound and sometimes she is curled at my feet and sometimes she is thrashing against the kennel door. My pain comes to me with her shame-tucked tail, her hung head. My pain pushes a wet nose against my hand. My pain scares the mailman. My pain sniffs the butt of your pain. My pain smells something familiar, does yours? Across the dog park we lock eyes over the heads of our pain. Our pain chases itself down the hill.