if I insisted on
standing with my back to the
tiger
if I did not know yet
what trouble was
if this was the beginning
I willed into being
if memory must be
washed in sunlight
if I got into the car
with strangers
if I used to laugh
at my inexperience
if I crept in the
cleft
he left by mistake
then
was there something wrong with
me
do I have to explain
at the time
it all seemed inevitable
as expected
growing up
as a girl
2.2
traps
symptomatic
of
inner life
under glass
the present simulating the past
memory restrained
and retouched
expensive relics
eased of blood
by the
hunched
heavy limbs of
time a tick
in the shape of a man
I often catch love
metamorphosed
into compromise
when
I analyze
a moment
from the outside
I revise the
swoon
I was only
bending
forward
into the warmth
to prove to myself
at last
I was loved
Eva Della Lana is a poet and diarist from Ohio whose recent work has appeared in DIALOGIST, Lunch Ticket, and The Florida Review. Her erasure project is in conversation with her teenage chapbook, Places She’s Been (Pudding House), which received a Pushcart Prize nomination in 2006. She currently resides in Los Angeles, where she works in a library.