The Inheritance

-Chloe Garcia Roberts

Bathe the body from the bones and only
us, is left
colorless as night flowers, leafing silently
beneath.

Identity isn’t built out of memory,
it is the regeneration of what has already dried to ghost
swimming up to
skin

and after tainting a lifetime
from within
hardening the person
to her final form:

all that comes again,
before.

Every girl child is born holding
a chorus of eggs
whispering secrets out her air

the knot of her face
binding all that wait before,
again.

Each year the clot of we
sidles closer to the burn.

I hear their fingers tapping against my windows
the coolness of their petals lush against the bone

all my face:

just a thickness of glass
for our blood to press its hands against.

In the future, a child will grow your features over again,
like snow breathing in the black face of the water

you will be two incarnations grown so estranged
you no longer recognize each other.

Her body will be an ache of ground glass
you will wake into

and devastate.