My Older Sisters

My mother always told me,

“You are so stupidly sensitive,”

So silly-

My stupid

Crybaby,

Baby girl.

Sit up.

Don’t cry.

Napkin on your lap.

Baby-

Nose in the air.

Lest you become aware

Of that which is below you

By birth.

Lest you let

Poison

Permeate your lungs.

Sometimes when I am alone,

I sit and I cry,
I slouch and I weep-

Dangling dirty boots,

I know I don’t look so pretty

Nor refined,

Like mother likes,

And even when I am alone,

I feel her pressing disapproval.

I am ashamed of my

Emotive face.

And according to mother,

Shameful’s how it should be.

I number each tear

As they fall into my lap,

Over such stupidly silly things,

The first is over a year passing,

Over a change from single-digit age

To a daunting double-

As I have three sisters
And I have seen them all become

Women.

The second is for my oldest sister,

The one whom I’ve heard screaming.

Long after dark, when she comes home

With sullen, haunting eyes,

She’ll press me harshly to her chest,

And whisper me mistakes-

Her burning cheek pressed to my roots,

I stare at bruises up her thighs

With feeble voice and jagged breath,

“Be smart, baby. Be wise,”

Through her shaking, trembling, convulsing,
I feel not one single hot tear-

Vehemently she cleaves to me,

Pleading regret into my hair,

With one last imploring, beseeching whimper,

She chokes out her indelible words,

“Baby, please,

Learn from me, learn from this,

And take only a man

Without a temper,”

The third is for my middle sister,

The one with sleepless skin.

As she tenderly cradled her belly,

I remember her new softened eyes,

On the night my father’s gaze found fire

And mother led me from the kitchen-

Sometimes in my own bed at night

I hear the fugue in reprise,

“What were you thinking, you selfish girl?”

Words subordinate to piercing cries.

Through her screaming, sobbing, yelping,

Father paints love into sin,

Then comes the sound I can never forget,

The snap of leather on skin,

“She will marry up, if she keeps herself in line,”

Come the coddling words of my mother-

But some nights I hear her,

Sobbing still,

As her room shares

Walls with mine.

The fourth is for my third sister,

The one who looks without seeing.

On the night that she escaped herself,
With wet and twinkling eyes,
She told me through staccato breaths
Of the man with unforgiving hands-
Emotion thrashes at her features
No longer hypnotized,
Exhaling, she squeezes shut her lids,
Betraying daylight's careful guise,
Through her cowering, struggling, blanching,

The tragedy dribbles through quivering lips,

With the painstaking image of a relentless grasp

Constraining inviolably virgin hips,

Her pervading phrase still renders me sleepless

“Sexual does not always mean loving”

Our eyes meet,

But she does not see me

Through tears both silent and ceaseless

The fifth is selfish,

A tear of wondering-

For what will become of me,

For it seems

Becoming a woman

Means receiving good reason

To cry to yourself

Tonight.

But you should feel shame,

Your tears are so crude.

Your pain, so unladylike.

The sixth is for my mother

Who has tried to keep us

Pretty.

For in primping and shushing

And slapping at our wrists,

She knows not

What she’s done.

2012