I have held you upside down

and shaken you until you are only

feet and legs, a body whose torso

has shivered apart into a cascade

of leaves. I remember raking them

into a pile, my dad stretching

a pressure-treated beam between

two pines, stringing a swing up

there for me. I would leap

into those leaves, and stay

in the place where I fell

turning the crater my body made

into a nest. I have held you

upside down, hoping

our histories might fall out

of your pockets, or your mouth.

I have written words onto what leaves

are left of you, have strung them

into lines as if they grew that way.

Somebody once told me

that if you hold a woman

upside down, she will lose

all of her language and never

speak. My favorite part

of the leaves was their sound

when I crushed them with my own

small body, the way that,

in their death, they became

most loud—their sound, and the quiet

after I landed, the quiet

as I gathered all the leaves back

around me. A woman’s leaves

might be her birthright, her glory,

her inheritance, her shame.

A woman should never show

her leaves so brazenly.

When I went inside, I would find

leaves crushed into my pockets,

in the wrinkles of my socks,

and tangling my hair. It takes

quite a lot of time, quite a lot

of shaking to unravel a person

in this way. How can I explain

what I have done? I only wanted

to see what sort of autumn you,

what sort of tree I might become.