I’m beholden by a scar that freckles
for the reminder of the sun and such corporeal frailty
markers of moments of change, stacking
pebbles to give thanks, soft whispers through dawn steam
subdued qualm, overdue calm
crisp wind from the horizon brings leaves across the reservoir.

It’s somewhere in the uncanny valley
past the trenches of familiarity and feign
a vain path I imagine would hemorrhage, bandaged by a vice
device drugs of ultimate detachment. The energy it takes
to turn on a machine turns off the self first
all by which we’ve known has changed as fiction forbode.

The thousand dots of damage, surface scuffs screaming age
adorn a breathing being between worlds, woman worn
razed, rebuilt, returned. A substance powered in a lab
and pressed into a pocketbook can hide any blemish
what’s to be done about their other engineered exports,
selfish as commodity as excuse.