Genealogy

This is one of seven lies: I grew to love
the absence. Months before I was born, my mother

says, a man came home to dig out the dead
maple tree in the backyard. Says when she was seven

the branch that held her in a swing split, like her knee,
with the fall. I took

my shadow for a sibling
for the longest time. I carried the dead

in my tonsils. One dull midnight
in August, absence

boiled my skin to purple seeds: fevers
high enough to stretch the horizon on my face.

My grandmother pressed the cold
eggshell against my skin. I felt her

prayers shift the air, the candle’s burning
in the nightstand, her rosary crackling as she broke

the tainted yolk
into the glass. Mira, she said,

& I looked: yellow leaking the red
dot of absence which I bore: my mother’s

dead tree: loose soil in the backyard:
my father’s face looking back.