Thirteen

I found her as a whispered line in an editorial
stuck on the silk folds of a silver jubilee
like regret.

She had bled once in a different continent
A red thread pulled taut at thirteen
Doctors sealed the loom forever.

I was thirteen too, still learning the
topography of my brown skin.
My hands trembled like birdcage doors
unsure whether to open or close.

The article was a medical moonspeak
which orbited her wound like gravity.
Her body was an eclipse,
a shadow swallowing the sun before its rise.

Some thresholds are chasms I learned that day
shaped like hospital beds,
where young girls are unravelled.

The editorial has faded like old ink
on rain-soaked newsprint, but her sentence lingers.

And I am still standing barefoot at the edge,
where pain and empathy hold hands
like hesitant strangers beneath the doorway called thirteen.