origami storm cloud

I could fold myself to be small 

An origami bird on an open book 

But the sum of me would bear down on the home itself

folding fire into a whisper

to fall, heavily, into the blue-red core of center-earth.

In the passenger seat with my mother

I wrote it into my arms with white nail tips 

my voice at the dinner table, whispered its roar

under the table white half moons gracing me

like incisors against cheek

open and raw, red and fresh. 

my bones were so visible my mother wept at my back. 

my small arms were blooming violets in their knobby-ness, a fold of garden in the crook

so thin they said later— with lacy admiration but 

there was a gallbladder and a stomach and a stool sample and an enema and vials filled with me and a hospital visit and weight falling off of me like February snowfall, my thoughts staying put

As my mother pleads with me to just take 3 bites of the bacon lettuce and tomato.

limbs thin enough to slip between a sliver of light

and a mind stretching its seams to their breaking point 

not contained, no matter how small I become 

instead brutish and swollen somehow.

my father buys pistachios, and i eat while the hospital television crackles an image of a chimpanzee. 

I wanted to be an origami bird 

a paper weight on an open book 

Not the storm inside the halls

And the cold iron panic curling in my chest, pulling me 

To the molten core of it all.