A sixth of my life I've spent
never speaking a word to my mother.
Or my father.
They are not dead.
Dead silences are awkwardly honest;
it's the ones with breath in them that haunt.
Half my life I've whiled away
trying to be a son to parents
who razed two-thirds of it
questioning the anatomy of inheritance,
then spent the remaining third
issuing corrigendums on how to prove I was one.
Two-thirds of a lifetime,
assuming the past will let me call it mine.
The remaining third I've tried to outlive,
hoping to wake up someday
without the yesterdays
I've buried, still answering to their names.
You must unbecome inheritance to let your lungs inherit you.
But unbecoming is a violent subtraction:
pulling their surnames from beneath my fingernails,
scraping the shape of their jawlines off my own face,
refusing to let their history dictate the geometry of my spine.
How many fractions remain
when you divide a ghost from the bone?
Zero. And still, the lungs.
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