The First Scar

The shower is cold and the tiles smell like rot,

I’m scrubbing the day off, the stuff I forgot.

A decade of trying to build something new,

to scrub out the old and to change the whole view,

but there in the center, a knot in the grain,

a small, puckered dip where the traces remain.

I find a blue thread from a cheap winter sweater

tucked in the place where I used to be tethered.

It looks like a thumbprint in unbaked dough,

a hollow that stayed while I started to grow,

the very first wound that I’ve ever known.