SHE IS

Now I break myself in two. One is guilty and one is innocent. One gets yanked and the other does the yanking. I let them share the same space and fight it out. It’s a good fight. The older me is angrier but the young one is spry. The kid is getting good at building up walls and prancing along them in her nine lives.

SISTER/PROPHET is the umpire, the audience, and the bookie. She shakes her head and bets by casting her chickadee bones to the floor and listening to their words. Impassively she calls out reason or theatrics or whatever suits her mood. And she laughs, does she laugh. Not cruelly, as she has no malice, but in genuine amusement.

The kid is too busy trying to negotiate gifts wrapped up in invisible strings leading offstage. She’s greedy like a child and told as much. And so she is greedy and guilty. And so she starts leaving. She never runs away for more than a couple hours and it’s never long enough for anyone to notice she’s gone. She figures out that she can run away in comfort, without the messiness of hunger (though she will go hungry) or the stickiness of white pine sap (though she will be stuck). She closes the doors which don’t have locks and unzips out of her life.

I’m angry again. Throwing fits or just keeping the edge close in moments of joy. Keeping her on her toes. Who? Does it matter? She’s always there, with her freckles and softness.

SISTER/PROPHET is there to intervene when I get too simplistic.

SISTER/PROPHET is there when I overthink it.

She is the but in every sentence, she is the or, the comma, the pause and the contradiction. She is the fold that reveals the tag, she is the inside of the rabbit’s pelt: glistening, strong and laced with fat and blood clots.