We were given our first set of bones
as a rehearsal:
Each bud soft, pliant, and designed for falling.
No one told us they would loosen.
In those years, we swallowed the world whole.
We engorged, feral and dripping,
running our tongues along every sharp edge
just to taste the sting, the iron, the alive.
Our mouths bled and called it discovery.
We healed overnight and called it virility –
that slow unfurling of razors,
splitting the gums open in its flowering.
The second set came in harder,
no soft-petal emergence, but a breaking through,
a calcified bloom: permanent, they said,
as though permanence were something to celebrate –
as if the first set hadn’t known secrets
the second one would spend a lifetime forgetting.
Pia Fajelagutan is an emerging poet and author whose poetry, essays, and artwork have been published across the Gulf and the UK. Her work has been featured by The Poetryhood, Emirates Literature Festival, Poetry Supper Club, and Hold Space Poetry Festival. She is also set to release an upcoming poetry anthology co-authored with Kirsten Westholter.
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