What worlds does she know--
trapped within her mind?
Her eyes are milky white, retinas detached.
Her hands are contorted like a marionette's.
Her mouth puckers and her brows are heavy.
Mother tells me she's a miracle child-she was to have died at age two
and now she is 19.
Mother tells me she lost her twin long, long ago.

This child's self is engulfed in silence.
She is quiet in her sixty pound skin.
Her legs have atrophied.
Her brain has atrophied.
Her eyes are milky white.

As she sits silently on the sofa,
and her mother praises her survival,
I cannot help but wonder
how any heavenly being would allow
this fragility to continue.
Her face is twisted in sadness.

There is no one who will ever hear her
single-most simple thought,
for her tongue cannot contract in those usual ways.
Her vocal chords were severed years ago.
And while I cannot be proud for my thoughts,
and while I am ashamed for this mother
who did everything she could
to save a life that should never have been,
I see this child.

There is a universe in her mind
where no one is allowed
where no one shall venture.

We travel to distant space in rockets.
We create lives and destroy them in tubes.
We shirk our morality in order
to sustain that which should never be.
And somehow,
we cannot look into the mind of one small
undernourished
blind
atrophied
nineteen year old girl.

The womb is a terrible place when it fails to feed.
What right do we have
to contradict the womb's knowledge of life and death?

God strike me dead:
she should have been permitted to die
just as her twin did
just as her older brother thrived.
She should have been permitted to die.