it's the break of day, & I'm to select clothes for my sister’s body – an anatomy versed
in frigidness, whisked off earth’s skin. it's official: I'm the only branch left. eighteen years
                        of storytelling concluded with the undoing of her wrists. 

            I lay in bed, thoughts sprouting in my head, wondering if to interpret 
the looks splayed on my parents’ face as relief. 
last night, she flooded my dreams with ululations. her diary on my nightstand, a register

of her existence; how people sneered at her
                                                            for being wrinkled [ not straight]. 
it's knotty to sentence my hands to a selection. no, I'm uninterested in nourishing the earth 
with her body. if she couldn’t breathe environed by teeming oxygen, why offer 

            her to a world that dubbed her a contamination? I want her body 
cremated with the fire from the gleaming sun & her urn on my shelf like a trophy.