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.
From Please Bury Me in This. Copyright © 2017 by Allison Benis White. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc. on behalf of Four Way Books, www.fourwaybooks.com.