She says, It’s my birthday. I’m going tomorrow.

What's your favorite font? What should I

have him write? Serifs, I say. I like serifs.

I like old typewriters, the keys little platters.

I don’t answer the question about what to write.

The vellum of her back. I am not her mother,

who later weeps at the words written between

her shoulders. I get ready to retract the idea of serifs,

the pennants that pull the eye from one word

forward, but the eye loves a serif. When we

handwrite, we stop to add them to I. Read this

word like typeface, make me always published,

I am always a text. Write this on your back,

I want to say. Write that you are a lyric

and flying – serifed, syntactical. Becca chooses

Make of my life a few wild stanzas. She lies

on the bed while the artist marks her back,

his needle the harrow for her sentence. Make of

my life a place to stand, stopping-places, a series

of rooms, stances, stare, stantia, stay. She has

shown him a bird she wants perched above the final

word, stanza. It is a barn swallow – ink blue flash.

He says, toward the end, so she can know it will hurt

to ink so much blue, I am filling in the stanza now,

and he stings her right shoulder again and again,

filling the room of the bird. Make of my life

a poem, she asks me and him and her mother

as she walks away, make of my life something

wild, she says. I watch her strike out across

Number 10 Pond, the tattoo flashing with each stroke

and there is barely enough time to read it.