Birth Certificate for a Piece of Metal
—after Salt Hill
I was born in a Texan Steel Plant days after planned &
I know what happens to discarded metal that was once polished.
I was made into a crystal & there is a halo of fluorescence around
my head & I know the direction gravity pulls & I know
that the inside of my head burns like a junkyard.
Outside, there’s a twelve-foot Christmas tree made of
bucktoothed pine needles
& I know how they dry out before February even comes.
Sage-colored agony rises out of the pond out back where
I pushed my sister into the water, called her a duck &
smoke shot upwards in the distance. I held my lungs
in a glass box upstairs, in and out of Texan territory.
I know I’m not meant to be here—
The place where I buried a salmonella-bathed turtle in the summer
& broke my ankle running over an icy patch in the rain.
I think of salt flats during the times when snow comes, stick my tongue out just to
flinch in disgust & I know my time here is
the broken banister along the staircase.
Ema Bekic won first place in the Charles Crupi Memorial Poetry Contest for Michigan High School Students. She is a student at Interlochen Arts Academy.
