Pterygium – Sierra Armor

January 8, 2021

my sister’s teeth
were chipped like ancient pottery
they bit back padlocked thoughts

Hers were gums full of wet licorice
and loose threads
That gently held
the acidic smell of pennies

we buried the jagged bits
in the backyard
next to the guinea pig,
next to the glow fish that were sucked up
and shredded in the aquarium filter

My sister grieved less for each life,
than for her teeth.
She learned to weep ventriloquy
My sister is like me,
but with a shrimp-colored
mole in the whites of her right eye

She can perceive the difference;
someone staring at her mole,
looking her in the eye,
or probing her soul

The local evangelist
can identify a saved soul
in a pair of eyes.
He said I didn’t have
the candle of Christ in mine.
Mine were dull like mice

Hers had the saint-like fire
to cremate a city, though
even that light could be blown out

I watch her mole,
buried near the gray glass of her pupil.

She can only eat through straws now.
She lets straw wrappers and napkins
slip out of her hands
and get sucked up by a storm of
carelessness. She doesn’t care
that the wind molests her

Her mole is an infected peach, soft.
Strangers always wonder
if it’s contagious.

It is when it talks.
It tells me it would love to
push me into the barbed wire
of the tennis court
& take a racket to my jaw

I would turn my other cheek
It would turn blue,
making us nearly twins again