Laura Ingram

Nuclear Power

My whole life people have asked me
if I was born premature
the truth is
I came into the world only two days too early
with wings creased flat against my back
and rice paper skin.
Born the color of Saturn’s summer
sucked right into the gravitational pull
nobody would tell me about
until after
the atrophy;
nobody told me
that a ring is the only thing that makes a girl big enough
to be seen
from far away.

Surely there must be some being
who cares solely for
all the smallest things:
hummingbirds, electron clouds, seed pearls,
the beginnings of a spindly girl
with a body spun out of spider’s silk;
the most integral parts of Pointillism.

---

Ornithology

I.
Mother birds throw up what they eat
to nourish their young.
The reflection I flush down the toilet is distorted
but I swallow the haze of spindly legs and crooked wings–
tolerate the insects in my esophagus,
because we all have someone we want to feed.
Fourteen, hollow-boned and listless,
I have not yet bled.
I mistake this for a sign I am safe.

II.
My ribs feel like a small host of sparrows,
sharp and trilling,
cringing away from the cumbersome sun.
Overexposure is never picturesque.
I convince myself
the cold still doesn’t bother me enough
to be the first of my kind to consider migration.

I scrunch my eyes shut in the early hours of the morning,
sure that I hear the light rap of god’s knuckles against my hip bones
in this hollow house.
My bed seems bigger than before.

III.
I am an apparition of absolute zero.
Tracing the tessellated tile grout,
I can’t remember the last time I kept up
with the way unclean things converge.

IV.
I did not ask him
to love me and love me
until he was also empty,
behind closed doors and an open notebook again.
But when he cries in the night and calls out my name
instead of shutting my eyes again,
bracing myself for the fall
before flight--
mouths open
waiting to be filled.