The Metric System

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Was I always this small? Before, I’d wear shoes,

and you slept and you woke and you slept and you woke

and you called and then didn’t call. I have it all somewhere

in my brain, but I don’t want it. I want to sell the parts. 

Imagine a pawn shop with two shelves of us.

Strangers could haggle. Old couples, dumb kids,

some red-nailed collector, and me, I could be rid of it!

I’d have some more room for my hair and cold strawberries

in those green berry baskets. In truth, I find them beautiful,

but not enough to keep. Imagine building stacks

of everything not good enough, but just almost good enough.

Quaking in the wind, could they earn it, blind love?

I loved 8 PM until your old girl arrived there.

She eats whole cabbages and prays in your bed

like a vegan Mother Mary, so you promised new sheets,

new chairs, new books, and if I stacked every item

like bricks or my deficits and climbed them and jumped,

I could figure out how small I am. It’s not about the crash.

It’s what the people bring when they come to fetch your body

lying flat on the ground, body zig-zagged as the journey

from darling to prey. When I’m bored and want to suffer,

I paint a large mural. It is us in the shower.

And then I paint that girl, not between us but behind me,

so you see her, but I don’t. I paint five other murals.

In the first, us emerging and leaving her behind.

In the second, us drying. In the third, us in clothes.

In the fourth, we’re on the sofa. There is thought in your eyes.

In the fifth, you’re saying, “Baby, can you always smell this good?”

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Andrea D’Souza is a graduate of Princeton University where she studied Operations Research and Poetry. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

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