Philip Memmer

For you are like their parent who is never pleased and they are like your parent who cannot stay angry For you are like a child For age after age they conceive you and despite the pain of birth they bring you forth For they call you perfect though your hands are missing and though your heart does not beat they give you a name For they remember you For they hold you blameless in their sorrow though they were surely happiest before you arrived For your identical twin they name Silence and when they feed Silence he grows For they love Silence as they would have loved you even more perhaps as old age comes and they forget the sound of your cry and where the exact spot was they spread your ashes and how those ashes tasted when the wind blew them into their mouths Father in their dreams they worry still perhaps it is you who lives among them and not Silence after all mistakes happen after all how would anyone know and the midwives forgive them forgive them were only human

You have such lovely bones, he says, holding my face in his hands, and although I can almost feel the stone and the sand sifting away, his fingers like the softest of brushes, I realize after this touch he would know me years from now, even in the dark, even without my skin. Thank you,