the blueshift journal

After Rachel Cruea

 

September fleshed by like a seaspray of ospreys,

& I didn’t eat enough seeds to be scraped away

like the inside of a cantaloupe. Instead, mother

feeds me pills & marrow bones, kneads my knuckles

 

like malas to keep herself from surrendering

into my skin. But it’s October now

& I want to become more than livable,

a pagoda of something more than cariprazine

 

& teeth. How many times have we built this body

again from deer hides, pinned pelts to the walls?

If only the stags knew they would become

habitable, house women within their bones.

 

I should apologize— I should have been more.

Mother wanted to be a hairdresser instead, to shave

antlers from my temples & rebow the curve

of my maw. But her hair is silvering like the spine

 

of a New Year fish, & mine will go in the white

flinch of November. One morning they will find

me sleeping in the storm drain, & Mother will

lay me to bed under a tessellation of plastic stars.

 

She will braid my hair with paper cranes & orchids

& dip my head into a basin of milk. Dors,

ma petite fille: dors, dors.