The twin

I wasn’t supposed to have a body. I’m not from a family of bodies.
None of us were supposed to have bodies.

Then, the light left us off in the dark chamber
And each of us stood in the hall of her old heart beating.

My mother and my brother were there.
I was inhabiting a body of company.

Could I have my own, apart from the one I was inside
apart from the one floating next to me which looked like mine?

My soul was already confused.
It didn’t know how consciousness pulled the body

into the world or pulled it out of the world.
My soul was inside the inside.

All this, I was thinking, still lying there in my mother’s cocktail
only a light filling in a body

frail in the countermusic of my brother’s heart
who had another body but was in the same time of his body that              mine was in.

Then, 48 years later,
my brother died and dropped his body on the bed.

And I carried the effect of him afterwards down some coiling stairs
into the streets of Boston—music, garments, literature, some                    beauty stuff.

When he was living, we used to dare each other.
I dare you, he said. I dare you. And then, he died.

From then, we were still living (GenPop Books, 2010)