Sestina for Somebody's Sister
And tonight you feel as though everything is too big, and the world
might even be flat or square or like a cube with six sides. Your skirt for spring is too large for your hips, your flat backside. You'll grow into it now, says your mother softly. Your father frowns and watches your mother sip and swirl another glass of wine like blood, almost that sweet red, smelling ripe. In your room, you press on that space between your legs. This is where you feel most empty, the space where you haven't yet blossomed, unlike her. She knows the world, your big sister. She wears red lipstick and is terribly mature, almost an adult, with a boyfriend who smokes. Once you found her skirt on a chair, swinging softly, a bird's abandoned wing. You watched her and a dark boy on the couch, naked; spring grass was growing. Later you sit on spongy soil and wait for your buried bulbs to grow, bulbs you planted last fall with your sister who showed you to space them just right in that perfect row, a neat little garden row. Watching dirt that looks like ashes, you want more than anything in the world to know that sister again. Clouds gather the sun like one spring skirt; from the corner of your eye you think you see green, maybe, almost. You want to touch her, your sister, and you can fit your fingers almost around her porcelain arm. She's only bones now, limbs refusing to grow. You are silent as she passes a spoon between her delicate lips; the skirt of the tablecloth resting on her pale thighs. There is a wavering space between you. Remember a time when her cheeks flushed, hair whirled about her head in a cloud of deep red? A time before you hid to watch her when she arrived home hours past your bedtime, took off her watch carefully, locked herself in the bathroom to vomit quietly. It's almost spring; your sister's nose bleeds as she sucks on apple seeds. The world rises from a long sleep, brushes away the cover of snow. Things grow and bulbs begin to show their pale faces through the dirt, but the space between her thighs becomes larger, and she can't even wear your skirt anymore without it slipping past her hips. It's late now and a moth skirts around a kitchen light, frenzied, as your mother pours wine and watches the eight o'clock news without listening. The wine sloshes. The spaces of this heavy house are laced with a taste like pennies, something almost like certainty. Your father ignores your sister's absence; Mother grows silent. In her silence and pursed lips, you hear her disdain for the world. The world drifts off tonight and her bed grows cold, abandoned for now. Mother makes space for you on the sofa and tucks her white cotton skirt under herself, almost sighs. You fog the window, watching a reflection.
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