adoption papers

Red hair and blue eyes, birthed only from hickory—maternal and paternal, generations of olive skin and dark features

There was a handoff in the labour room—thick blood traded for signatures and lawyers fees

It was ironic; I entered the hospital enveloped in a body made of warm shadows—I left, grasping at strangers who looked more like me than she ever would

Before I could walk, there was sunblock as pale as parchment and lace, tenebrous proof I belonged—it was a bandaid solution for pink skin and blooming freckles, of which consequences would come later

/

Varnished trauma, hidden in bubblegum pink walls—homemade curtains, crooked trim, and dusty rhinestones falling off matching lampshades

As I grew in millimetres, the rose coloured glasses began to crack—primer was used to suffocate my curiosity

Restated in blues, an artificial calmness that almost replaced twelve years of whispers

I turn seventeen and there’s a new home with new paint—lime and loud and in your face, like my own diary with the broken spine

/

Finally, a white flag and more primer—but this time, salvation instead of asylum, and the walls stay alabaster

There’s a champagne birthday of a stranger, but I claim it as my own—I was seven for mine, my walls still infected with naivety

Someone accidentally shatters flutes—music falls from the third floor window, and glass is swept under the kitchen cupboards. They’re white too.

/

The years have come to pass—and with them, the guttural misery of the unexplained

My adoption papers hiss in the amber sun, hidden for twenty one years under bed frames and smoke screens— lost for blue eyes and brown eyes alike

In them hides a shared secret that the bonded have no knowledge of—opaque tears on translucent cheeks, it has been too long and tones no longer matter