Sibling (Poetry)

I would have had a brother — allegedly
if things had turned out differently —
younger by a year or two
if I remember those rare few
whispered awkward allusions to
some thing dismissed as ‘lost it — early on.’

I think of him — a thin red stain
flushed quickly from the porcelain.
Did she grieve
or feel relief ? —
that she’d been freed from further pain —
not have to go through that again —
echoes of my birth...

Did she know him — recognise a face
in ruins as her body claimed the space
he’d tried to live in? Did he haunt her mind
with cries? Her stonyness stretched undefined
across a childhood ages gone
and darkening —
What made her sure it would have been a ‘him’?