I am so terribly sad for my sister because she’s disappearing.
Sometimes I’ll find her standing on top of the roof with her plastic
high-heeled shoes dangling from one hand, arms stretched out
in front of her as if preparing for the fall. My mother asks her
to come down. But what she doesn’t understand
is that no amount of coaxing can talk down the one person
who’s already been down so many times they don’t know
what up feels like.
My sister’s drowning at the bottom of a well and there’s no rope
to hold onto. She’s trying to crawl out of her skin
so that only the bones are left behind in a perfect blueprint.
She wants to be a paleontologist so she can excavate
her own ruins.
And that’s a scary thing.
At age six she wouldn’t lick any of the candles on her birthday cake
because the frosting clinging to the wick
contained tiny traces of fat and calories.
At age ten she wouldn’t have a scoop of ice cream to go with it;
at age twelve she didn’t want the cake.
Once I had to call 911 for my sister, who had swallowed
an entire bottle of pills and was drifting in the bathtub
like a marooned ship.
And I remember her hips and the way her hair spread out from her face
like seaweed, her tiny budding breasts like a mermaid’s.
My sister, who was lonely and lost and lovely and misunderstood.
My sister, who wanted to disappear so thoroughly
that even the dust from her body
couldn’t be seen under a microscope.