LGBTQ+ Poem: I Got My Mother’s Bones (and Her Anorexia), by Brandyce Ingram

My DNA inches up my throat, settles into my teeth, and coats my tongue like rancid honey.
I’m too deep into her fantasy.

I was just a kid, jailed behind shins, hiding from the brightly-lit mirror.
What made me seen now erases.

Call it self agency or decay, it’s easier to play danger, test the weight of her flame,
whose fumes might as well be bone, stoic and honest.

I translate my mother’s fear on my face
like lead shadows left on an effaced page of broken hypotheses.

I have reinvented her as a scientist.
She still holds me to the light like an ossified insect.