Angela Narciso Torres
I was born with one rib
missing. My father
was born with one too many.
Sometimes my fingers
drift to that inch-wide gap
beneath my breast and I imagine
how my father must have felt
his newborn for the missing
part. Did he wonder why a rib
and not a toe, a finger—
an ear, perhaps?
Why that curve of cartilage
and bone, one of twelve pairs
guarding the pink
balloons of lungs, the liver,
the chambered heart?
In the story Hebrews tell,
Eve was made from Adam’s
tsela, or side. Did God take
not just bone, but flesh
as well? And if my father
had the power then, would he
have torn it—rib, skin,
sinew, blood, and all—
pressed it to the new
life sleeping there
to close her cage of bones?