1

I was conceived in an ordinary bed
inside the family house, my uncle Lester
listening, perhaps finding himself
beneath the new box springs. I heard

my mother’s mother was a witch,
or so Father said. At any rate, she liked
to make them tea, the brew steeped
in a vat that glimmered whale-blood orange,

what settled in them uneasily stained
their mouths cornflower blue. The same tea
the doctor sipped before he had me breathe
and found another heart that hammered

in a sunken hull of bone. I’ve never been
alone. I am all Gemini. Among the Hall
of Curiosities, we’re home. The swallower
of snakes shared us lodgings for a season

and I paid him back tenfold when his constrictor
vanished in its cage. I heard the blind girl scream,
the ringmaster’s only daughter, on whom
it set to strangling, undid the yard-long thigh of it,

wiped snake spit from her face, pampered
her, and still performed. That night, I found
the twin ropewalkers, red costumes pulled soundlessly
in silhouette and spilled about our lamp.