I used to wear your city

like second skin

thick, looping neverending highways 

cradled in the bayou

baking in the languid, damp heat

as if, somehow, living in your hometown,

a place you loved fiercely, openly

If i put down tiny roots, and I fed off the same soil, you would love me as well.

how I, still a Northern city girl, 

insisted on walking 

in a place with no sidewalks

a vestigial habit of a life 

abandoned on impulse

And every time I would return,

years later,

after you hacked away at a connection

(a break, not clean, but seemingly final,

fractured bone and torn muscle, 

that did not heal right 

a thing I did not notice until far too late)

I would find the connective tissue 

faded but recognizable 

allow myself the luxury of crawling into the messy surety of the past

a reprieve from the fraught unmoored present tense

and pick at the flesh 

to see what would unravel.