A Self-Help Book Says To Confront Your Possible Selves

The girl I was supposed to be lives on a street named for a flower
she strings ghosts up on the wall like lights               they lead her

            to the living                 she visits neon gas stations and still
appreciates the stars, and when her fangs grow

too sharp she saws them off with a Swiss pocketknife          every day
she invents new ways to wear her body

to shadow        I glimpse her and every midflight swallow dies
in my throat         and when something happens to her

she screams an appropriate amount and her face becomes
only jaw          only flee        the sky testifies over

and over; everyone     believes her. She has never disappointed
her mother       when she converts

to air everyone gasps       and applauds. She smiles at me,
unblinking: she stands before me and shucks

all her skin      I wring my myths open and bend down
to my prayer. She shadows me, guiltless.       What is it called

           when you are given everything and still cannot be
anything? In the house where I used to live   scrawled-over Bibles

            detonate in closets       moths bash their desires
against screen doors. I tell this to her             and of course she laughs,

           but nervously. She smells of gravestone daisies        and patience
and she will be here forever. When I hear her echo,

I close my eyes           when she calls my name
I snap her neck

Gaia Rajan lives in Andover, MA. She’s the Managing Editor of The Courant, the web editor for Honey Literary, and a poetry editor for Saffron Literary. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Rust+Moth, Hobart, Kissing Dynamite, Glass Poetry, and elsewhere. She is a 2020 National Student Poets Program semifinalist and the winner of the 2020 1455 Teen Literary Competition.