Every day when I was five

I asked my mother if it was my birthday,

and just when I began to believe I was

the only person who had never been born

I came downstairs to her holding

a single balloon in her hand. I do not remember

the color of it, or what her face looked like,

or what she had said if anything at all, but I remember

thinking that I knew something more about the world—

there had been a time before me, and then

I had, inadvertently, begun. And now a balloon,

made both invisible and permanent by memory

could mean everything, and descending those stairs

that opened onto a day uniquely my own, descending was still

an action like any other, and meant back then

an entrance into something open and full of light

like the kitchen of our old house in the morning, like

the front door, and not an unwilling return

into some dark and flooded basement

of the heart, my heart, which I believed

years later was my real home.

And when I lived there, by which I mean in the flood

I lay belly up, waiting for whoever it was

to be finished fucking me, I would feel humiliated

not by however my body was being used

but if, at the end, he would pay for my cab home;

home being loosely defined, in those days,

as a place away from men who I hoped,

being older, would be more dangerous

and maybe kill me or something and then I could leave

the world the same way I entered it: with all the mercy

of having no choice. Though in the end

all that age meant was that

they looked weary in lamplight and it almost seemed

I was offering them whatever little mercy

I had left in me instead. But please don't get me wrong.

It wasn't always like this: though I don't remember

what we talked about, ever, or how we came to meet,

a boy comes to mind, sometimes,

who drove me across the Verrazzano-Narrows

Bridge on accident, when we were trying to go

nowhere, not Staten Island,

and immediately turning back around

paid the toll twice, while I sat in the passenger's seat

and laughed until I cried, and though when I left him

that year, going home for the summer, I told all my friends

It's not like we're gonna get married, or anything,

I still told all of them, the story coming out of me

involuntarily, as though it could demand, somehow,

to be born. And even if, after I came back,

I didn't call him and we never spoke again,

I at least know why I didn't: because at that point

what had gone between us I could not afford

to ruin. Like when my mother once,

sometime between that boy

and my year of no birthdays,

when I knew something would soon go wrong

inside me and still wanted then to try

to fix it—suggested, outside the psychiatrist's office,

not looking at me, that we die,

right then, together. And I thought of how

every night when I was five

she would silently kneel in front of me

on the bathroom floor, brushing my teeth,

holding my mouth open, carefully, with one hand.