Still Life with Pronoun and Scalpel

With this blade, I must trim you

from the meat of my stories. Now

I will stand next to a genderless friend

watching Prince strip Little Red Corvette

down to one unplugged guitar. I water down

the weekend we spent on Topsail Island

until it’s me, a mixtape, and an indefinite

pronoun riding shotgun. Every plural

becomes singular—no one remembers

the motel room in Columbus

whose reek of secondhand smoke

and lavender potpourri

would not wash from my hair. It is like

tearing the ligaments that bind my arm

to its socket. Look how biography

dangles useless at my side. I’ve got to dodge

the discrepancies, stop talking so much,

lean away from where your collarbone

should be. I’m re-recording those years

and saving the sound bites. Let me believe

it can be clean. I keep having that nightmare

where all my teeth fall out when I tap them,

which is supposed to mean

I’ve allowed things to slip from my mouth

that I should have held in. My neighbor says

that a dream of losing teeth

means you are telling lies and I grin back

with empty gums. These revisions

are labored, like your breathing

when we climbed Chimney Rock,

which of course is a fiction

because I was there alone,

no lover on the radar at all.