In my dream, we're eating oysters.
We sit across from each other on the edge
of Massachusetts.
We are mirror images of each other,
our knees as thin and pointed as needles,
our hair long, weighed down, like seaweed on land.
We stare at each other, our mouths twitching into the silence
and I ask you if you like the oysters.
Your fingers shiver as you squeeze a lemon,
trying to grip its skin.
It's off season
so there's an older man at the bar with puffy under-eyes
but otherwise, the place is almost empty
and I'm consumed by the waves behind you.
They're a lighter gray than the sky,
but the water, it's a mirror of the bowl above,
and I think of us
and everything we don't know we share.
We're ruled by the same moon.
The oysters are salty, sandy.
I overload them with lemon,
puckering and smiling,
trying to make sure you're enjoying this,
our first reunion alone, our first reunion
where your curves are starting to fill out.
In this I am the older sister, but I am also other.
I remember when we were as skinny as telephone poles.
We walked like gazelle, and I didn't have you as a mirror then.
You had your mother, who is also mine.
Would you let me call her that?
The oysters are as rough as rocks, their outer shells like lava
that's frozen or the skins of dinosaurs.
They say they open more or less as the moon waxes and wanes
high above them, through layers of salt water and salt air.
They're communing with outer space like small aliens
that clung to asteroids in spinning belts in space and fell
and now they talk to her, their lunar mother.
It feels strange to eat them.
I can't look at them as I let them slide down my throat.
I look at you, at the bones under your skin
and at your eyes, gray-blue.
My sister, although I do not know you.
Emma Powers holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She was born in Tennessee and adopted at birth, and in her poetry and prose often explores subjects such as grief and longing.
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