We are heavy with so many stories. We are dying from them.

*

These are the things of bruises and blood and breast-milk.

Of memory imbued in marrow and laden things like family, like feeling. Fallacies and fictions.

These are the things that the body absorbs. That transfer in platelets and haemoglobin hurt.

That knot-up and build heavy monuments on the flattened soft of the shoulder-blades, pulling them up to the ears, head slunk low.

This is what we were given. Our anaemic inheritance - sour and sweet and rheumy, a line of fine fear trailing from the navel down. A feint line in brown splitting the forehead.

The body and its borrowed stories. A woman and a woman before her and the women before them.