by Marissa Bell Toffoli
People always claim golden ideas,
to have been Cleopatra or King Arthur.
Well, perhaps. We can only trust
our intuition. I want to know
how population growth factors in.
Will we ever run out
of past personas? Are some souls
on their first run through?
How does the whole system work?
I don’t care about being famous.
Nameless, not a bother either.
What I would ask is, how did I die?
What languages did I speak?
As if it might explain away
my fear of dying in a car accident
or surgery, or while giving birth.
Wouldn’t it be convenient
to point to a tree of your own lives
and say that root there is where
I learned to be afraid of flying.
Or this branch, here, why I became
a nurse instead of a painter.
What if it turns out I was someone
unsavory? Would I spend the rest of this
bough waiting, expecting
punishment for what
I’d been a part of before?