Exchange.

We carry these little histories

like so many houses

All these different doors we find

to hide behind/to walk through/

leave open/to close

*

Bartering our existence

we exchange small pieces of ourselves

until the lines blur

We are not stand-alone objects

We are looking at ourselves

through each others’ eyes

Two people in the dark

showing each other where the edges are

*

A series of living prints

we construct each other

and we construct ourselves

I have someone else’s dreams sometimes:

we are painting our insides golden

_ _ _ From Bullet Hole Riddle (Steele Roberts, 2014) Previously published in Landfall #218 Written by Miriam Barr as part of the 2009 Metonymy Collaboration with Heidi Brickell