(Glass, “Prophecies”)

I was cut from my mother.
Born with eyes wide open, bald,
striking terror into my father’s heart.
“That’s not mine,” he had said.
“He wasn’t mine,” now I say.

My third eye opened in the third trimester.
“I heard you cry in the womb,” my mother said when I was sixteen.
“I told your grandmother and she scolded me, saying
‘You’re not supposed to say anything;
you just took away his gift.’”

She sucked her teeth when she confessed
and I didn’t know how to confess
that she hadn’t taken anything away.
How do you tell someone you can see
the parts of themselves they try to hide?

I dream of my psychic cry.
Sometimes, it wakes me up at night
and I’m screaming into the dark.
My lover comforts me.
She touches me, her fingers telling me she’s mine.
I turn to her and close my eyes
And try to sleep with eyes wide open.