I think of Whitney Houston    in her sequined glamour
   She’s centerstage      It’s 1988           Her head
             Thrown back against a black backdrop     She is the only thing
      glowing       So distant                        from us in the universe

    of her voice                 She is already dying       when
I hear her sing the first time          When I slip inside
   my rhinestone leotard white tights          Before a mic
              My vocal chords are still elastic                  Vibrating harpstring

    Not yet sclerotic with unlovely smoke                    and shame
    I’m drawn to Whitney like a cardinal on a branch
in winter            Beauty too bright for camouflage                 Her story
a constellation twinned with mine. I love myself 

          because of her. Our sweet lip sweat sparkling in the flame
light. I went home inside myself too. The world became so small.  
          Secrets collapsing my life into a vacuum. To burn a little longer—
Whitney, you know           no one is coming—you must        save yourself.

I am writing to you as an act of ending.

Cutting faces out of paper and folding them in envelopes like thoughts.

Am I a monster, Clarice Lispector asked in The Hour of the Star, or is this what it means to be human?

To be alive, I think as I cut another face.

What makes the shape become visible, and breathe, is the angle and variation of absence.

Sugar skull, I whisper, what I have known all along.

I am you gone.

I can’t claim to have been too surprised on hearing that my past
was on fire and I could only
save one thing. I couldn’t decide
between the time I read about an actor dying at the peak
of her earning potential and the time
we were all invited to join our employer’s annual
NO GAIN CHALLENGE, which incentivized remaining
within one percent of one’s weight each holiday season.
I couldn’t decide between how my boss
used to hover in the lunchroom, clocking the contents
of my sandwich, and the time you
called me HANSEL OR GRETEL, whichever got assigned
by the gingerbread witch to the cage; you could

never remember. At one lunch everyone was talking
about a pop star who would alter
her look all the time through color or cut. Often she wasn’t
recognizable right away. I’M HER RIGHT NOW,
I wanted to say and then rip off my face
for the reveal, like in  Mission: Impossible. But I wasn’t her,
though I too was always changing.
I was like the Ship of Theseus, if the rate of replacement
of the planks on the Ship of Theseus
was under one percent per holiday season, which it certainly might
have been; I never checked. The local industrial
smokestack vomited steam. The air was dry. The sun
was like an oven. Go on and get inside.