before I found my voice
ink bled through my skin
and I stored pages of it under my bed;
not so much poetry as hummed song–
some in high-school French or Spanish,
mercifully lost now, but somehow less cloying
than the love letters my sister wrote to herself
that I found later
in the back of her Social Studies spiral notebook
I learned early to be secret with writing
after my mother read the journal
I left on my nightstand. We were the same flesh, still,
in her eyes; though I walked and thought
independent of her and free of that cord,
she was not the one that cut it, and I would not either,
until later, when I would get paid for reading
in public, the day she asked me to use a pseudonym
because she found my words too strong,
too radical, too sexual to have Daniels associated with them.
She never mentioned it again after I agreed,
saying I would use her name instead of my own
if she thought we were still one person.
Susan Daniels Poetry 