Salvaged Bodies

Paula V. Ayala López
Departamento de Inglés
Facultad de Humanidades, UPR RP

I sliced clean my fingers

and sewed them onto your hands,

replacing the ones you’d burnt

tracing the acid tears of a lover.

You cut a part of your chest

After I ripped mine apart

Trying to tear out my heart, egest that damned

                                                                       soft

                                                                       capricious

                                                                       malleable

                                                                       thing

Why does it still scare you

to know we are scraps of each other?

Your cry is a midnight call

about how your/my digits have turned verdigris

threatened to fall under the weight of your damp desolation

because there is no one else there to dry them

—I’ve tried to preserve these pieces of you but they

    still crumble; I told you this would happen,

    I didn’t want to know you so I wouldn’t forget —

but I tell you the plaque over my heart

has turned rust red-brown, cracked and bleeding,

and I don’t mind for I know another will come

and lend me the crook of their elbows, their spines,

the curve of their shoulders, the corners of their smiles,

just as a stranger will to you.

I will not lie.

We might grow rigid, foreign to each other’s existence,

But you will find me when you need to,

and if we knew how to move together once,

we can make something of these fumbling forms

and learn to dance again.