Two sisters, their craniums joined,
share a single brain, together they
attend law school, walking
side by side, unable to look directly
into each other’s eyes, or ever
spend a moment alone,
but competing in a three-legged race
of interminable length, each
hobbled to the body of the other.
They can’t follow their own desires
but must always compromise, negotiate
endlessly: when to rise, when
to sleep, what music to play. They eat
meals on separate plates, always together,
each dragging a body not her own.
At night they imagine separation, the handiwork
of dreams rearranging their conjoined lives:
one twin climbs a porch latticed
with ancient roses, the other opens the door to a
secret room, marble-lined, which her sister
never visited. One runs freely along
a cinder track at dawn, and the other sleeps late,
breakfasts on quince flowers
and honey. But waking, they remain joined,
the canvas of possibility remains blank,
waiting for the first tentative hand
to lift a sable brush and scatter dollops
of paint, for one set of eyes to gaze
into a mirror and see reflected there,
for the first time, no one except herself.
Claudia Buckholts received Creative Writing Fellowships
from the National Endowment for the Arts and Massachusetts Artists Foundation, and the Grolier Poetry Prize. My work has appeared in
Indiana Review, Minnesota Review, New American Writing, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, and others; and in two books, Bitterwater and Traveling Through the Body.
Featured image: Como el Café by Megan Leppla