When we were younger
there was not a single day
that we did not scrape open our knees
against the metal pails that Mother kept
in the kitchen.

“To ward off spirits,”
she would tell us at night
as we lay in bed
with our breaths hushed
as the body of a stillborn child.  

The day I was born
(in white hospital
in white sheets,
everything white
as the face of a choked casket)
Mother told me about the first child
she’d given birth to:
a child birthed and then dead within an hour.

Ever since then there were
the metal pails, all of them
lined up carefully
along the wooden kitchen
like a crowd of empty stomachs.

There we slit our knees
and there we waited for Mother
to come stitch us up;
there we were ignored.

Our bodies looked
like ghosts’ bodies,
only our knees
were more overtly bleeding.    

2.

Growing older means:
less ghost and more large stomach.

The metal pails are still in the kitchen, only
Mother’s body is now curled up and dead
inside of one of them, her body curled up
right next to that of the child, the one dead
within the hour. Growing older means:

more summers sticky with sweat  
between our touching bellies,

our bellies dead and vulnerable
like the loose faces of paled grandparents
who are close to dying in nursing homes.  

When I am standing in front of you
and when you are upstairs
and when it is nighttime
and when you are in my bedroom
(the bedroom where I used to live with my
five brothers, where mother used to tell us about warding
off spirits) standing in front of me with heavy abdomen
I am most excited to curl up against you, most excited
to cry like the gun of my grandmother
until I can no longer feel my belly.