Hollow Bones

HOLLOW BONES

for Marielle

I. For You

These words are for you

and you alone. They have not belonged to me

since the moment you grabbed my finger

in your plump, brown hand,

claiming me your sister.

I know that I have owed you these words

for years, that they should have

been tucked in next to you

and your stuffed purple lamb

at bedtime, back when

we slept in the same room

and were separated only by air

and dreams.

If I had known how easy it was

to let time waste away, decompose

like some rotten banana peel,

black and thin on the roadside,

I would not have left

my bedroom door bolted shut

all these years.

II. The Things I Know, the Things I Don’t

How to grind the weed,

how to smash it between my fingers,

how to make a nest with the leaves

in a clear plastic bag

once the seeds and the leftovers

have fallen like hail

into the fold of a sheet of paper.

How to read our parents’ faces like street signs,

when rage sleeps behind their eyes

and when it doesn’t,

when to go forward

and when to make a u-turn.

I say I don’t know why you have

that broken look on your face

when you come into my room

asking if we can watch

Slumdog Millionaire together

and I say No.

I say I don’t know why I hurt you,

convincing myself there is no way

to fill the silence between us

that thickens like fog, as haunting and

still as the abandoned swing set in our front lawn.

I know you through and through,

tell myself I don’t,

hoping that the arm I hold in front of me

to keep you away

will also blind you from seeing

the differences between

the sister you know,

the woman I wanted to be,

and the person I am.

III. Stories

This is the only thing I am certain of:

before you were born, when you were just

the essence of a human being,

a seed in our mother’s belly,

I whispered the beginnings of stories to you,

about sisters who would pick peaches together,

race bikes around the neighborhood,

share the same bedroom,

and fall asleep holding hands.

I know I never gave you

a happy ending

to the stories I began,

but these words are all I have

to offer.

IV. These Words

Do you intend

to care for this poem like I hope you do?

Once I’ve wiped the amniotic fluid

from drooping pink cheeks

and sent it in a woven wicker basket

down the Nile River,

will you hear its soft sleepy cries

through the tall grass of the muddy banks?

Will you scrub the river mud

from the space between its toes,

hold its tired head

in the curve of your neck?

Will you care for it in all the ways

I’ve cared for you, and in all the ways

I should have cared for you?

V. Pieces

Baby sister, here is the truth I’ve owed you:

When I move away,

my only wish is that you will be

wiser than I was, and strong enough to know

the truths about love and hate

and the symmetries between.

That you will know better than I,

by the redness of our parents’ eyes,

when to stop their fight

and when to lock your bedroom door.

And I hope that when I’ve left

you will know what pieces of me

to keep, treasured secrets

in the jewelry box you bought from Chinatown,

and what pieces of me

to cast away like hollow bones

where no marrow runs through.