When you sleep, sweat collects on the back of your neck and in your palms.

Dandelion fur floats along your jaw in the spring but you can only tell at sunset, the sun sideways making everything fat.

Mornings you will not make it up a hill but it’s not your fault: you are 150 percent more plasma, more palms, more psalms, which does not feel like blood but more like children on your ankles.

Your face will look like the face of 2003, beer-swollen and hopeful. You will look up at the sky as you chew.

As if in hibernation, food will collect in the backs of your arms and under your chin and in your breasts and thighs. I am sorry, but you will not be able to zip up that dress. You will sit there on your bed alone with the dress unzipped, chewing. Light will dapple your thighs like an invitation. Your humor will not reply.

You will eat four eggs in the morning alone, alone. For lunch you will eat with the dogs, apples and cheese.

Your veins will tell everyone’s eyes where to go, to follow the map of unnamable tributaries: nipples swell and they do not descend like airplanes. Nipples swell like they are supposed to so you may turn away. You will sleep.

You may slam the porch door. There will be a thick boundary, a corset pulled taut like a failed parachute wrapped around you. All love is an intrusion.

You will sleep and dream in color of rhubarb and demons, and you may wake screaming.

When you lie on your back your right leg goes numb but not your left one. When you walk your left thumb goes numb but nothing else. When people need something from you your heart may be cold, no longer inside a diplomat but in a castle with a thick moat, your words like chain mail around your stomach.

While nearing the end of a book, you will cry and then sleep with that book in your arms, your breath a rhythm that makes the words a baby that doesn’t end.