Self-Portrait as the Chosen One

Long before I was what I am now, short

of breath, bald, just returned with arthritic knees

from exile in another country’s muck and red

volcanic soil, too near-sighted to discern

the High Plains tumbleweed from the burning

bush of myth, scorched now and silent,

long before this, I was the first son my mother

bore that lived. The first two were named,

baptized as they strangled blue and cold

in the stillborn canal. Incorruptible halo

of hospital lights. But not me—I got dragged

through by the forceps in time to cut the cord,

unwind the noose of flesh from my pulsing neck.

I can’t be sure when she first told me this

story, this incantation, why they adopted

my brother before I was born. Maybe I was

five or six. But I heard it so many times it swelled

below my skin, a cyst adherent to bone.

We were walking on an unweeded path at the edge

of some woods a few blocks from the house,

the trees razed later for condos, a strip mall.

You’re a miracle, she said. You’ll do great things.

But I haven’t. I remember the September grass

wilting, the dead leaves’ veins crunching underfoot.

From that day I’ve been lost, wandering

through a field of flawed memories and missed

signposts. What she should have said is

you will learn even your skin is a borrowed mask.