Kallie Falandays: I Am No Name
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Summer, 1996

I see him at the table of my dreams—
my childhood darkens over him slowly as I sleep.

He uncovers something torpid
on the underside of the wood:

the whisper finger. The gullet.
The dream hallway’s weeping with bees.

It is dark and funny in the kitchen of my dreams,
where I find myself broken.

A finger tears through my vagina
until I am no name.

No one hides their face.
The little girl crouches next to her broken box.

I wonder about how there’s no blood
even with so much breaking.


Kallie Falandays is the author of Dovetail Down the House (Burnside Review). You can read her work in Day One, Puerto Del Sol, The Journal, and elsewhere. She lives in Philadelphia, where she runs Tell Tell Poetry.