To All My Girls Under Observation

After this one’s first attempt, I want 

to etch a sigil on her forehead, back, or arms, 

something to ward it all away so she will not be 

like her little sister who’s been in the psych ward twice, 

had those questionable overdoses last year. 

She did it for attention, they say of each other 

and reach their hands for their bootstraps. 

They are beautiful, fashionable girls more into 

strappy sandals. There is nothing to hold onto. 

I want to put them in a dumbwaiter, folded upon themselves so tiny 

to pull them to a higher place where none of this can touch them, 

though I know it does no good since it’s all inside them now, 

a collagenosis that will not heal. If I were a better person, 

I would walk behind them their whole lives, shoring  

them up, pushing them on so their mother’s tensions float in the air 

behind them, growing farther and farther away until even their shadows 

have enough distance that they are peeled away from them like 

the skin from a chicken and they stand vulnerable and stripped, ready.