when i was born,
i swallowed whole my mother's faith,
took my father's secondhand conviction
through a hollow needle and a silicone tube
as grew it swelled inside me,
distended with air, and bore me up,
through the flashes of brightness
and slow-moving hours under the clouds

until it burst, its synthetic skin pricked
by a thorn that had hidden between my vertebrae
since far before my birth
and in a moment, i breathed it all out,
stale air, ideas printed by someone else's lips

i was afraid to be empty,
expecting to find my bones brittle, my joints crumbling
too heavy to bind together under the weight of vacant alien skies
for days, i waited to sink like a dried skin

instead, i found myself on my feet like i had never been,
on my own, on the other side of hollow
whole, for the first time,
and filled, for now, with nothing but me