When I was too small to see over my own nose
My brothers told me that I wasn't really their sister,
in fact, I was an alien. Found under a rock.
In a cave. On the moon. I did not believe them.

I thought I would grow, become
long and beautiful and shaped like fascination
and all would see that I was everything
and strength, and softness. They'd forget my sins.

I worried when my friends grew tall- I didn't.
Playmates became unrecognizable,
cool, nonchalant, gorgeous, effortless.
I stared in the mirror as if it would transform me.

I fell behind. I did not bloom. Instead
I picked at myself, cruelly, cut little punishments
into the flesh of the thighs that didn't grow fast enough,
into the girl who didn't quite understand what she did wrong.

I wondered if everyone secretly knew that I was less.
That something was different. And in their way,
I think they saw, if only out of the corner of their eyes,
that I wasn't right. Like a spectre that almost mimics human.

The world made sense to them, and I studied for hours
but could not read between the lines and ascertain
why I had no home- where the changeling came from
and how she'd get back to the others like her.

I called to the moon, hoping they'd remember
that they once left a child under a rock somewhere
and did not find her when they returned.
I'm ready, I said, where's our ship? Where's my place?

But no one visits the moon anymore. Her dust is silent.
And if there ever had been a nursery in a cave,
it lies abandoned, mother and child forgetting eachother.
Never seeing themselves reflected elsewhere in the cosmos.

I grew up in my own time, but never tall, and
I was more frail than the strength of my convictions could imagine.
I could be beautiful for my species, the best of them, the last one,
but I am forgotten, small, an alien without a reflection.