And then there’s my other sister,
my father’s first daughter,
drifting, a sea-tossed medusa,
tendrils trailing beneath the waves.
Or I could think of her
untethered as star-scattered dust
speckling across the night sky’s dark skirts.
I can still hear her voice,
her adopted Southern lilt.
She decompensated, as the doctors say.
Decompensated, as if
the composition of what made her, her,
could fall away,
floating out to a farther shore
like the lilies on the pond
behind the barn.
When I was small,
she laced up my skates
---hand-me-downs from her---
and wobbled me onto the ice
hand in mittened hand.
I didn’t really know her then
just as I don’t know her now.
But I remember how
she’d make water colors bleed
and bloom
as if she knew an alchemy
no one else could see
or understand.