Mother, don’t you dare
Look outside,
It’s autumn,
And our secrets
Are falling in the wind.

Those blood leaves are lying
Slaughtered
On our driveway.
And, yes mother,
I’ve been careful to step around them.

I know how you cannot
Bare to hear them break
Underneath us,
Our weight,
Our burden,
Our burden.

Stolen faces
Out of fogged glass
Like to watch us tiptoe around
The colors,
They can’t understand.
“Why do you dance around them?
They’re already dead,
The leaves are dead.”

Dead,
Yes, but they were not born that way.
They were not born lifeless,
Born cold, born still.

My sister was.
And as she lay slaughtered
Underneath depths of dirt,
People are striding over her,
Breaking the ground against her coffin,
Their weight,
Her burden,
My mother’s burden.

I step around the leaves, the blown grass,
The rotten petals, the smooth bones,
The blue lips, curled fingers, and deformed head,
As my sister, who has never seen the sun,
Felt love nor pain,
Stays not to be awoken; dead.