When I Was Something I Am Not
By Alice Costas
I was born somewhere else, I want to tell you. I was not in the basement beneath my grandparents apartment, child-water didn't soak the ropy shag carpet, no ambulances sounded.
And my fingers? They were never blue, because I never withed five minutes to breath.
And I wasn't raised in a warm book for two weeks breathing enriched air instead of the real thing. My mother's hand never rested above me on glass, no, I was born somewhere else, where blankets do not split from bodies because they are our skin, and on cold days my eyes don't tear, we never gather anxiety like a ball of sap in the path of our air. Bodies where I was born build like trees, thick rings of wood, they don't break so easy. Where I was born, we speak a language that you cannot.