Sofia Drew

A boy like a thorn in my side,
secret keeper, always first to know, textbook twins
you are my repression, my neurotic needlepoint.
You make me feel like I’m in a time loop where everything carries on like normal
but every two days I get a call to say something worse.
Every year my cowardliness is more revealed to me,
like dead skin sloughing cell by cell to reveal bones that twist
and shake under a pressure I’ve invented,
we’ve both gotten accustomed to the bridleways of our family
but you were always taller and stronger than me, and three months older,
and you got to the facts more easily,
I shied away from detail of any kind,
constructed my place in things with a kind of pointillism,
witnessed the doubling, convergent evolutions,
you are singular in too many ways to live here.
I spent enough time in sand made of tiny pebbles
getting bleached by a land that didn’t want me.
Now I feel claustrophobic if I go a week without seeing salt water,
I strain my neck going round corners,
I thought I saw you at the bus stop
after I said you couldn’t sleep on my couch.
I sometimes think I could live for me alone,
only to calcify on a sea-facing cliff somewhere
with your name written in the sand.