new section of my version of "21 love poems"

i crack my forehead open at four
on the legs of the dining room table, the way
the thumb goes through tissue paper, two
sinks converging under blood
sailing ships of browning washcloths
sinking under and they stitch the banks
back together, the doctor -- his scalp
a rock i could climb on – says, as he sinks
a dragonfly needle into my skin,
that it is going to be like he is sewing
a dress on my forehead, and my young mother,
a seamstress who, at 27, already has
frazzled grey bolts bleaching her
dark brown hair, stops crying austere
quiet sobs long enough to hear these words
and feel like she has not failed,
but i still lay on the table and feel
suspended by the heaviness of fault past
and future: wrong-angled wooden legs, blood-oiled
scalps, cracked-open bodices, brittle twirled black
hairs twisting in my hands.