Alexandra Fössinger

★ ★ ★ ★

POETRY

Image by Matus Kovacovsky

Negative

There is a red room left
over from my childhood,
where night was stuck in a jar,

and I was the least viable part,
the impossible third of
irreconcilably conjoined triplets –

hardly more than an absence:
a head, one hand,
an atrophied heart.

The others never spoke to me,
they thought I did not exist,
so maybe I didn’t.

Still, words kept popping
out of my body
like daughters,

and I began talking to holes,
learning their meaning,
shade after shade.

I fed on privation,
never dreamt up
an outside, being my own.

When they left,
my negative imprint remained.
There it is, still imagining

how I would have grown up
to eventually become
a perfectly intelligible whole.