Fourteen

Rebecca Halonen

She’s at the pool again.
Her arms, soft arrows, point outward
to heaven or to oblivion, her face to the ground,
her abdomen recessed
and suspended over her favorite beach towel.
Against our twenty-year-old pool deck scrapes knuckles
as she pulls and pushes in a dream.

Like a hunger artist, my sister is contained
and neat, always left wanting–the goal
unsustainable–a life more novel
than fiction. Scorched skin, tanned skin, freckled
diamond bands, another body, to be
barely human again.

Before birth was peace.
After infancy came grief,
and in her fifth year, my sister
drove her tricycle into our backyard pool,
told us she would never in her life bear children.
Today, at least, she gets what she wants: thighs taut
as the swollen skin of a corpse. Her body’s exterior: a new violent pink.
Sun-ripened blisters to match her interior.
She will shed her skin in peels and clumps,
but the pain she experiences will be no more acrid or profound
than our disturbed family history is long.

Scrubbing off the last of her former flesh in a shower,
my sister does not cry. She steps away
from the steaming water, a bewitched and smiling
woman. She moves forward, and puts her clothes on,
because new beginnings are a dime a dozen to this family, and everyone
deserves rebirth.

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