Sister Bodies, Decade Five

In your latest photo, Sister, your cheekbones stand
such stark relief, I’ve quite forgot the color of your eyes,

our mother’s liquid blue or amber lionized. The pose
suggests you’ve sucked and puckered, chewed the tender

mouthflesh to hold back vile words. They pulse,
I know, in the veins that climb your neck,

your sweater draped around a shrinking frame.
I see you lapsing, worry for your collarbone,

the thinning sternum, your brutal, brittle ribs.
Do you eat, Sister? Once, we were plump girls

who couldn’t keep our fingers from what was sugar,
fat, and salt. We raided all the cupboards and rode

waves of guilt, the pangs of loathing as we built
ourselves to an anchored weight, a way

of making sure we never strayed. We were paired, then,
by appetite and plodding metabolic rates.

Yet now, you’ve outstripped me, whittled yourself
to an absence.
Forgive me if I grieve.

Sandy Longhorn has received the Porter Fund Literary Prize and the Collins Prize (Birmingham Poetry Review). She is the author of three books of poetry: The Alchemy of My Mortal Form, The Girlhood Book of Prairie Myths, and Blood Almanac. Her poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, diode, Hayden’s Ferry Review, North American Review, Oxford American, Thrush, and elsewhere. Longhorn teaches in the Arkansas Writer's MFA program at the University of Central Arkansas, where she directs the C.D. Wright Women Writers Conference.