Replacement

It’s taken me years to puzzle, sifting through boxes in closets, through wardrobes in my mother’s room, piecing together the years and the pictures, running my hand over the green velvet drawer liners, fingering the tassel on a laminated obituary, that this girl wasn’t that girl, and that girl wasn’t that boy, and that boy wasn’t born the year my brother was born, and that seemingly there were two children who died, two children who were my parents’ children, and so then they were my siblings, and then there thus a part of me, but they were taken from me, before I had the chance to know them, but I got to know them, in their absence, in the hollows that they scraped. 

I’m in corsets and eyes and in my mother’s smile—she is so radiant—and I’m on the damask couch with raised red roses and raised red leaves, but we both must have lain there, our heads down, lain weary, laid to sleep. One of us left to puzzle here. Confounded and confused. Flustered and flummoxed. Did you visit me in the snow without leaving footsteps? Did you pound on the bulkhead while I looked at your papers? Watcher in the woods, monkey on my shoulder. Eyeleted protector, phantom damsel, eyeing me askance from afar.