Pink contrails, the hue of serrated flesh,
carve over dusk’s faint blue sky
slowly fading scars, evidence of humanity’s
great heaving need for motion,
remnants of our original displacement

dusk, like any good parent
does not transmute its damages to its child
or rather, the transgression against the mother
is not marked visibly on the daughter’s cheek

But perhaps it is just that parents
wear their pain more viscerally
their deep sorrows refracted through
the growing brightness of their children

The quarter crescent moon is a birthmark
misconstrued as a mark of vitality
Her millions of freckled brothers
have been veiled beneath humanity’s scar tissue