dear sister with the disappearing yolk, had I been less
starved, perhaps you’d have survived the utero scramble.
who were you before I absorbed your gobbledygoo?
would we have grown sitting at the same table, watching
grandma’s slippers shuffle to the kitchen before dawn?
her birdlike wrist, swift like a woman who has always
been bird, winding up a fork for a good whipping,
two eggs whirling into one. you and I
eyeing the tidal wave, that summersault and undertow,
our mouths cracking for the carved challah soak, the wet

before the burning, the dry. were you someone
who fried whole bodies, learning to eat
yourself? I lent you my ear as a parting gift; it was only fair.
did you swallow that part of me? me? I’m always inhaling—
but you already knew that, my copycat. never mind
the mother bird who chewed and spat. were we not the same
swallow splitting the same cracked house, fork tail,
sad song, yoked together before the beak sliced
our cord? I eat things that flit outside myself.
digest them hard. I don’t make the rules.

a greyhound and her owner walk outside
the windows of my life. on the porch, while I fill
feeders and baths, I wonder if the hound is you,
skinny legs reborn. stringy like a sprinkled fawn.
when I look again, the seeds spill.
one time I spotted a red-tail clawing a rabbit,
but it didn’t seem real. so I did a double-take
from my passing car, but the field was a sea of grass,
silent. that’s when I turned to the passenger’s seat
and said that’s you, dear sister. that’s us.

JESSICA BALLEN, MFA, is a disabled poet who serves as Editor in Chief of Lunch Ticket, Managing Editor of Defunkt Magazine, Senior Editor at Small Harbor Publishing, and guest editor for Frontier Poetry. Their work can be found or is forthcoming in RHINO Poetry, Harbor Review, and Ghost City Review (among others). You can find them compulsively posting on their Instagram stories @_j___esus, listening to dream pop with their four cats, and dancing in the Willamette River with their writer husband, SHT.