Martha's Vineyard

In your father’s office there is a picture of you and your sister, salty-tangled and sun-browned, trying to out-grin each other, your small bodies draped in matching blue sweatshirts that say Martha’s Vineyard. Yours has fallen off one of your freckled shoulders; the sleeves hang almost to your feet, your hands invisible. That you will grow up and put your teeth on my neck, your famished tongue in the cave of my mouth—it’s too much; I can’t look at the picture. That you were a child, that you didn’t know me, that we couldn’t have known what we didn’t know.