It is the skin I struggle with,
or rather,
the bones underneath the skin.
Some mornings I wake to find I have ripped myself open
and I am peeling back,
the bones desperate to claim some part of me.
Each time I cover my hands and hair and ribs with scotch tape to avoid unnecessary questions,
pretend it is a fault of nature and not my own subconscious wondering
what it is my bones look like
or if they could make a difference
or if I even want them to.
I know this is the kind of unfolding I will always do.
I know because my mother still unpacks her years for me;
what began as stories
of a childhood run on wild jungles, sweet juices,
a country whose name I choked on and never understood to be more than
straw huts before the age of five,
these stories become each passing month something different,
sharper, stranger.
the words she unwraps now are more fragile -
dark and great, sharp and beautiful and bitter and
foreign
and I think maybe it is her bones that are changing.
I know because my aunt still writes poems about it.
She pushes stories and molds histories onto the faces she met on the street as a girl,
looking for answers to the questions she did not know how to ask then
and maybe hoping
she'll find the bare bones underneath
to fit better than her pink, accusing skin.
I know because my father,
he is unsure, even still,
of if he ever stopped becoming them and started becoming us.
He watched as his brother stumbled unbelonging to his bed one night,
exhausted from another day of trying to fit square sounds out of his round mouth,
and awoke the next morning with a new history painted into the back of his eyelids.
But my father missed the age of self-fulfilling prophesies
and now only knows where he is,
and where he is not
and that, somehow, his bones answer to more than one name.