and you cross stitch a tapestry of your life together, yet-
you seem to leave out the same three colors every time.
you crotchet blankets and scarves of your identity
but the spindles never brush against reality, 
never go deeper than some vacuous facade.

you sew and sew so you may bleed your veins 
of chromosomes wrapped in beautiful histone
packages, yet is your heritage and being hereditary
all that you are? you are the lapis waves of the ocean,
crashing down on sandy shores and...

the frost freezes our tears every december
as we visit that petite casket under the oak tree,
branches sheltering us from the biting cold.
our mother still keeps the soft blanket she wove together
with mournfulness & morning sickness for you--
it is somewhere, beside the dusty baby shoes & behind
the empty scrapbooks. maybe one day we will open up
those books, collect our lives in pointless pictures, pry
open our rib cages & sacrifice our hearts to nostalgia ...

it has begun to char again. this heart, that is. this heart that caves
    in upon itself, heaving up beating bits of blood,
                                        carving off crimson to the slaughter.
                (to some sort of sacrilegious sacrifice.)

& tell me:
         why does my heart not whirl in mechanical synchronization?
    why does my chest not click, a metallic machine that no god ever created
                     ...

See, she was talking to those men in the ivory coats that day,
the men with the cruel metal instruments and cures to seemingly
all diseases but hers (and you still can't seem to remember
if it was summer or winter, spring or autumn, but the air held

something to it -- humid, sticky like wet parchment. There was
a certain weightiness to it), and she didn't seem any different,
but a smile bloomed across her face like spring's blossoming touch ...