Paint me a picture in which you are the only
source of light, in which you smear an unattractive

glow across your moles and scars, your secret
melanomas, in which your ugliness

extends a furry arm around your shoulders, unbraids
long fingers at the throat to keep you

company. It holds you in the night, slips out
the window to your father’s avocado tree and clips

the leaves and toasts them on the hot clay
of your brow until they darken

and you wake to notes of licorice. What looks like space
behind the green is only a deeper

slice of wilderness that holds us here and burns us
on our own small flames. When I was a girl,

I stood beneath a fig tree, pressed my face into the palm
of every leaf. It taught me how to burrow

into unripe days, to see how I could
break and multiply. I mean this

as an access point, a ribbon end that leads to something
I can’t name, some origin

pulled tight against my skull and twisted
in a knot of contrast color. When I was

a girl, I crawled inside the bitter
marble of a fruit and sang so you could find me.