I am born in the springtime, underneath a moon
swollen as the abdomen of a rat. My body
out of the womb looks like the shape
of my mother’s wedding dress. From there

I grow like the belly of a pregnant cow, only
with no milk to offer; there is nothing pale
about me: later my parents will call me names
that translate into nighttime and I will hear them

and I will go to them, mindlessly, like a bucket
of breathless water. Today is my sixteenth year forty-sixth day
and they still call to me and I still go to them, but this time
with a face like red seas. This time they look at me

with fear knuckled through their voices: I look like the raw
and sore underside of a cold nose, the kind you get
from enough crying and not enough sleep, and also: I
am too thin, my bones stick out from my body like the stripes of a bee.

Days like today I wish for somebody to sink into like tissue paper.  
Days like today I think about being in trees with my brother,
the world dark enough to make the two of us look
like scratched mirrors or splintered eyes. We do

not speak to each other, do not look at each other, but
our breathing is identical, both of us shadowed away
from whatever screaming sounds the house may make
when it is late and my mother and father do not know

what to do with the worries that take over their bodies.
My seventeenth year forty-sixth day I will go to them
and I will apologize, my voice whispery like a soft limb,
my bones less visible, more hidden, more like ghosts.