I was lonely when we met. I was lonely, in fact
for a long time before that too. My sister tells me
That we are born alone and we die alone.
⧫ ⧫ ⧫
There is a quality about misery among sisters,
something like how you don’t turn around at night when your shadow
catches up to you, even though you’re certain it will hurt you.
Something like flattened roadkill you run over again and again
on the street you take to work.
She likes you because you laugh easily
And you are just small enough to dry-swallow — you’re good like that.
You must have been hungry, she sneers,
And I’m guessing that she might as well be alone.
It’s because a sister is a version of you who got hit
With the corner of the book instead of the flat.
There is a quality about misery among sisters,
Something like how you can’t tell if the screaming is coming from inside or
outside. Should we do something to help? I don’t know.
Something like rooms of flex walls
Falsely bifurcated at wrong angles.
New yorkers can take one look at my room and tell me
that it was made all wrong.
Yes, that must be it.
One night, my sister:
I never considered her to be a good
Let alone a mom.
Let alone a mom, and she
stops telling you things. Like how
One day, you see a fat bruise on her toes and
ask her how it happened.
She’s not sure, which is code.
You look just like your father.
Who looks just like a crooked yellow tooth
Skinny with rot where it never gets air.
A sister is an animal that bites you
Just to taste her own blood.
Like how your dad only calls you in the winter
because no one else is picking up.
A sister is a new bird, messing up the pecking order.
she gets wind-nested into these sick little tornadoes of hot motor oil
we’ve been spinning up in America. Here, we prefer our poison
laid out, a little pool of blood in the middle of my bed.
Yesterday, we were vomiting the same bile in and out
Of all our maws all day long. Dather to maughter to sother to fon.
All of us, gagging up the acid, hot dry wind.
The past exploding into my eye like a highway gnat,
Smearing across the windshield.
You look just like your mother.
Who looks just like a slow, numb frostbite.
I am used to this cross-contamination.
It’s the sister I didn’t factor. My sister who
Let alone a mom,
Let alone me with these people.
Now we have to take turns bleeding.
A sister is a rorschach test that always looks
like the anger you can’t shake.
The one in your mouth when you woke up this morning.
By now she knows that she must become soft enough
So that the blows make no sound as they land.
Soft enough to pass right through.
The sister, the black eyes of an animal where you can see yourself
With black eyes too. But taller. Meaner.
Deeper wound, somehow less blood.
The sister as an echo,
blasting radially outward in every direction. The sister as
a curled lip, and she fights like an alley cat.
As a petulant bitch refusing her dinner, and tearing out
her own curled nails one by one from the pads of the feet in the struggle.
The sister, crash-landed, earth-stranded, girl.
“I hate everyone but you.”
She bares her teeth saying this, drunk.
If you sit very still next to your sister,
there is a ripple in the pond where you see yourself for the first time.
⧫ ⧫ ⧫
My sister says that when I was born, she thought my mother had shit herself.
That I looked like a little piece of poo.
What I don’t say because we both already know,
Only big sisters are born alone.
