Names for Girls without Mothers

1
He forgot
there aren't that many possible birds. Soon
the world will have to start over again

in the same space, a crush of repeated
species, three types
of duplicate blue. God, if it wasn't for the
names
you'd never tell them apart.

2
He didn't see her
until she was
enormous, far too big to fit
into two lips, five fingers. She didn't look
around her—no eyes

or too many. Her blindness
was like space.
It was like heaven. Not god, but the intensity
that passed
like a wave through god, she had no need for fingers
or pointing.

She was the things
to look at.

page 32

3
It is the unblue inside of her eye
that makes the sky
different from the birds
that fly through it.

The voice in the wind never exhausts itself.
He spent centuries trying to identify it, built systems
of prediction to fill up the universe, turn accidents
into performance. She whirls,
a cutout, shape of flat paper
a squint

on the eye of the emptiness. It is pure white, rolled back
into every head.

4
She was supposed to be ordinary.
Pink skinned, smiling. Not colourless
not
skinless
I lifted the cover on

an old face bobbing in the heart hold, the sucked
stomach

where I watched fingers pop out
like rubber gloves, a foot pump up
like a cartoon bubble,
the whole anti-digestion.

Propelled by a held breath
I kept being born,
I didn't know how to start/
there were so many holes to go through

page 33

I have been clones, triplets, you name it.
One day even the names will run out.
He
only knows this language, these
numbers. I will have passed the test, scored

my own words.
He will not see me.