The Thing About Antlers

So it happened that on my sixteenth birthday
I woke up with antlers sprouting from my head;
twigs of bone like the branches of the wallow tree
that grew behind my childhood home in Puente de Piedra, 
and the limbs of the hares that roamed there.
 
The doctors gawked at me 
like some medical enigma 
and afterwards they sent me home 
with a prescription I couldn’t pronounce.
They didn’t understand that to me, 
this was just my birthright fever,
my grandmother’s fungus.
 
I see why she gave up walking,
the weight of my antlers cause my feet to 
stumble as if I am newly born and learning to walk 
on white calf socks and tabi shoes.
I break everything I touch. Cheap porcelain 
plates and cups, my mother’s prized potted orchids,
once I even pierced the wall and cracked it like pavement,
 
but that’s not even the worst of it.
The real nuisance is the shedding,
cascading from my hair to my knees in
ribbons of red velvet flesh, leaving a trail 
that my mother resigns to clean up for me.
I shed with no warning. Some days are nicer, 
but nice days mean nothing when blood-rich skin wraps me 
in my bed like a corpse and I look dead 
like my grandmother.
That’s what my mother says. 
 
De qué sirve, si solo mudarás tu terciopelo otra vez?
 
I tried to cut them off once. 
Imagine, I thought a razor
would cut through velvet. Because 
some part of me wanted to remember 
what it was like to be fifteen, 
before the antlers, before the fever,
but to tell you the truth
 
I don’t want to remember.
Because the thing about antlers,
and their cyclical shedding, is that once you have them
the thought of losing them feels like
losing your hand, your leg, your heart;
 
you aren’t human without them.