i was born on a good day, my lunar birth date ghosting
on the reader's fingertips. he flips through the pages to

  search a birthright, an astrology that
i never knew. the reader says that i was born on a

good day, that i was always meant to be a lord.
always meant to rule. yet these fingers have

  never sifted through the yellow soil of this realm,
  a field that these blistered palms should know.

for i was born on the first day of spring, the awakening
of the dragon from slumber, the next ouroboros. the

shedding of the previous metamorphosis, every new rain-blessed
  scale worth a geography of a hundred middle kingdoms.

  born on a good day to be a lord; to be a
god—what am i but (a blessing for a faraway land)

  a betrayal of my own? for living is to hear
  the whispers of those before you and know that

you do not fit into their legacy. it is to apologize to
the snake mother that you are made of the wrong soil,

  that you are not like her other children. it is
to be stitched with an anagram of creation myths,

patched with the living, aching to breathe in your own skin
  and learning to strip it whole. apart from the

  old bones of a million enshrouded by mist, this
  bleak countryside - graves dug & souls sheltered—let me

reclaim my snake blood as an apology for being
a dragon in a foreign land. reclaim my birthright

  as an apology for letting my
  soil sift in soft, white hands.