To the Man Who is Sleeping Here

I come across the old picture and I

don’t know where my smile went. I smile differently now

to hide the missing backteeth, but even when I’m alone, when I try to smile

free and happy like the girl in the picture, it looks stretched and strange

and wrong. I don’t know where the smile in that picture went.

There was a time when, if I closed my eyes,

I could feel wings preparing to explode from between

my shoulder blades, felt as though

I could take off into the air at any given moment. Now when I close my eyes

I feel my fists balling up into hard knots, imagine what it’d feel like

to punch things. I don’t know where the girl in that picture went.