My shoulders slip out of this dress like a stillbirth.
Blades of bone suggest wing, angel statue, pre-death.
When I breathe you know I am not there, replaced
by a brutal emptiness. My verse rattles only hollow notes
into this humid dusk. You are impressed by my soullessness. 
I let a cuckoo into my heart, she slaughtered the child I was,
and now she is all I am. I cannot pretend to sing, high, sweet, 
warble how you thought I should. Left here to leech your care,
I’m only misery’s baby, a prodigy daughter, I’ll push any soft
embryonic shred of life that emerges in the nest of my ribs
to the hostility of dirt, to be desiccated by sun, food for worms.