Emma by Riley Barnes

Oldest, truest friend

Bound by blood of an unknown pedigree

We share many things, past titles

Like memories of when our beds laid parallel, between the same walls

Now, they are separated by mountain ranges,

Responsibilities

and ambition

Distance has made part of her a stranger--

She sings in a language I do not speak,

Talks of names and lands I do not know

Though, the mother-tongue has not been abandoned,

Its syntax, unchanged

We exchange it in low tones, only interrupted by toothbrushes and foaming spit

Mom tells stories of when we were girls

And when she was but a curly-headed pantomime

Ruddy knees and wobbly calves, dancing the same strange dances of coming of age

Now, her orbit is her own

In all its glorious waxing

and waning

She hangs her own stars these days, with a vision I have not inherited

Perhaps not even a gift of the loin, but of her own making

She rearranges Orion, hums as she works

Casting a once concrete form as her own

When her steady chore is done, she takes a step back,

Wipes her hands,

Next, her brow

And hurriedly moves on to Andromeda