Birds of a feather, we said, and played charades. At an age when we could not yet pronounce collage, we were taught to glue glitter, eggshells, and feathers on paper as if to make up for shattered mornings swept like dustballs under our beds. One of us said she had tried to gather silver globules of guilt on the kitchen counter, the broken thermometer in the sink. Obedience was our pledge in wobbly cursive, never going beyond margins others had inked in red for us. The nuns nodded off years later, oblivious to the swelling under our tetoron blouses. We learned to snicker at them, at the puddles under their arms, under sleeves like hefty wings. They never saw us hatching, never heard the lipstick twists, the flurry of pages, our coughs around the first prized cigarette one of us had stolen from her mother’s pack. After graduation, she told us of the arch of a fortuneteller’s brow that meant, There is little that is innocent about you. That unseen gesture was the signal. We fluttered apart, never talking about what came after: the gasps we masked as bliss during our separate rupturings, our skins articulate with so much weight. Or the trembling of lovers’ lower lips across tables while we fumbled with our histories. Perhaps only our hands grow more fluent with age, leaving fingerprints on glasses others will break, hovering over the shoulders of those we choose to keep on guessing.
This poem is part of the collection that won Second Prize for Poetry in the 2005 Palanca Awards
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