POEM FOR MY SISTER, OR A POEM FOR GOD

i knew a girl who became so hungry
she swallowed her own fists
because so many children were dying
and she found out the hard way
how thick blood is
as it spilled from her old body.

yesterday she stopped eating dust
and ate the flowers trapped in her skin
— it was the anniversary of when
her vein’s tasted air and our father
said he loved us for the first time since Iraq.
i think she knows how much blood
is in her veins, she told me how
little everything matters when all of that life
is dead on your hands and if the world had a father,
if God had hands of his own and eyes he would see
all of that blood slipping between his fingers
and he would have to bite his knuckles too,
he would only have his hands to devour.

FRUIT AND OTHER THINGS WITH BRUISES

bad news arrives even in the morning / and sticks harder than fruit juices on the countertop / like in the
kitchen where the baby is dead / before it takes its first breath / or like when i am at my best friend’s
wedding when my grandmother dies/ and the sky is without blemish / so blue reflected in nail beds /
the day i learn it does not always rain when it storms / like when my mother pulled back my skin / an orange
the veins pulled / back into leather / how we were both unripe and unwilling / to sit where we could not
stand / this is the part i say it got better / will get better / but here is the truth / the women in my family are
bruised / with aches that cannot heal with time / rather are pressed into the little brown death spot / when
i bite into the bright of day / the one thing i know for sure / i cannot spit it back / the bitten piece will not
fit the same / and it cannot grow from any other garden / or from any other hands /

Caitie L. Young (they/she) is a poet and fiction writer in Kent, Ohio. Their work appears or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Scapegoat Review, the Santa Fe Writer's Project, and elsewhere. Caitie is studying creative writing in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts Program (NEOMFA).