Linocut by Taiwo Adebowale (16, Maryland)

[Content Warning: Self Harm]

Every time you returned to heaven
and made the moon bleed your essence,
​I read the saturnine rings etched by God 
on your mom's skin
to learn your name. 

I know your language.
I've spoken in voids like you.

I look up at space,
not to dissociate, 
but to carve linocut constellations
in the image of your body.

​You're beautiful,
but you're always undone.
I don't know who's eyes you'll take,
who's tongue you'll speak in,
what I am to you.

You can call me sister
when you're in a cocoon.
But they might prefer the name "mother," 
once you emerge.

Even though we're of the same blood,
yet different skin.
Half of the same life,
whole different souls,

they might prefer the name
 mother.

But if that's too hard to pronounce,
call me the fractured one, 
call me the black sheep,
the anomaly.

If I materialize and dissolve
faster than your birthdays 
or your graduations
or family cookouts 
call me by my full name: 
That's My Sister, But She's Gay 

I shift through lost polaroids
hidden in the basement 
as a prophet, 

reading blue cake-smeared lips 
and trips to Dutch Wonderland
as tarot cards suspended in youth

They never work.
I'm only clairaudient
when you speak. 

I carve my skin and
conscious like linoleum
in the rhythm of your mother's 
hope. 

To find you
in my temple,

to invoke you,
the spirit, 

conjured by
an offering.

I trickle down as ink
and preserve the negative
spaces between us.

I trickle between
two spaces on earth, 
two beings,
love. 

You take on the form
of my mind
when I don't want 
you to. 

You spread 
thinly as red.

Clotted with a part of me, 
taken back to heaven. 

I'm not mad at you. 
Five times, you haven't been birthed. 
Five times, I've heard Dad say "I'm raising
what should have been." 
And I know to exist
is a hard decision to make. 

But when you decide to come,
cry your name into my lungs.

I pray you're carved into life
 like linoleum.