adolescent my sorrow made me taller.  I could fold my ears without effort into the backs of my knees when I sat the unchaired ground.  

when we walked, sister she rode a worried duck.  we stilled ourselves on many an odd bridge;  pray, such pairs, that below any bridge passes the conscious river of horsehead and mudhoof.      

it was hard to tell what came first;  the duck or its worry.  hard to tell its not broken neck from its broken.  

the minute my sister and I were orphaned seemed an hour.  our mothers dropped easily into the same bottomless pail.  when we walk now, we listen.  my unmatched sorrow parallel to her mother’s appetite.  

I tend the bad back of a gravestone.  a broken tooth in dust-bleached shortgrass.  sister’s run off, but corpse

there are faster things in the body’s riddle.