“You have time,” they said, as if time was something I could hold,
could own. They called me starling, a word so much like
starving. Little star. In my earliest memory, I’m spreading toothpaste
on their comforter: sticky-wet medallions of green purple gold.
Nothing was dangerous then, not even the sting of menthol
in a paper cut, the vacant spaces that form when I spread
my fingers into five small towers. Little flesh-spears. Tiny violences
waiting in the wings. I keep having dreams about dying, over and over,
drowning in a sea of thick white paste, calling out for my dead brother,
believing I can save him. There is no going backward: there is only
this dream of my own unmaking, then the sour smell of a mattress
soaked in sweat. I have been a child all my life, waiting for time
to unbend itself like a newborn pulled from the womb. My mother wears
my birth as a smooth scar across her abdomen, memory embedded
in the skin. She tells me: you are not a thing that pushed yourself out
but something much less urgent. It was easy. It took hardly any time at all.
ZEKE SHOMLER is an MA/MFA candidate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. His work has appeared in Folio, Cordite, Sierra Nevada Review, and elsewhere.
