You Live Your Life

never suspecting that somewhere there is another you 

or at least someone who looks enough like you in a scarf and dark glasses

who has fabricated you from a scrap of paper littered from your life --

a credit card receipt, medical bill, utility statement, social security number,  

lifted with precision from a found piece of personal mail –

your life ingested by an interloper, a shadow on a bank security camera,

someone who calls herself you, uses your name to convince a bank officer

somewhere you have never been to open an account with your name,

and visits the cash machines over and over, pressing the lever like slots

in Las Vegas and keeps winning the jackpot again and again –

eighteen times, eighteen withdrawals before the plug is pulled,

until the account is shut down, until the dark woman disappears

somewhere north with your identity stuffed in her pocket,

and you can’t help wondering where you have been.