For Daisy
You remember all those women in the grocery store,
stopping our mother,
hands on knees, asking,
“Are they twins?”
You remember how the answer was
No,
how this happened so often,
the answer became
Yes.
You were purple
I was pink
If I had bangs, so did you
If you got a camera for Christmas, so did I.
Easters were identical dresses.
Back-to-schools were matching shoes.
On your eighth birthday,
Our ears were pierced
In my sleep, I lost an earring
You wear yours every day.
A shared bedroom, two sides, two beds,
one purple, one pink.
Biology
was the last class we had together
out of Legos,
we captured DNA replication
Our helicase was a dinosaur figurine.
Out of pipe cleaners,
we captured mitosis,
cell division
Our prophase was the day
you set books aside and I
stacked them to my half of the ceiling.
Our metaphase was the week
we moved into different rooms, across the hall,
one purple, one yellow.
Our anaphase was each year after:
The time you broke your arm
on the trampoline
I still hear your bones snapping.
The time you experimented with
eyeshadow, lip gloss, blush
while I explored the
color black.
The time I saw the dead;
you attended the school dance.
Our telophase is today,
every day after:
When you graduate high school,
when I save a life,
when you start college,
when I become an alum,
when you get married,
when I move across the state,
when you have your first kid,
when I can’t make it home for Christmas.
Biology
you never liked that class,
packets, book chapters, stuff about evolution.
But you remember
Sister chromatids:
we were
replicated to be separated.
Just Thoughts 