Sister, Be With Us
We took turns breathing. Like bulbs in a fisherman’s net her body we bore ropes in our mouths wiped our footprints from the bruised sand we flew until our plumage turned cirrus. Mother did not find us— only a watermark of sea foam remarked on what it saw. We grazed our cheeks against her wrists broke apart the hoarfrost. The fingers of a girl wrinkle differently. She woke to salt at her ankles a loom in the room of a field seven swans in the absence of brothers. We licked her threshed hands each night loved like lake water inside the mouth of a bear a stake in the yard the nettles against her skin. When we came for her she cast nets like shirts— Each of us was noble born once. The milk on our tongues tastes of sand.