Did you know

my sister was Fed-Exed from Korea?
you say,

dazed under the haze of hospital lights,
your arm tethered to an intravenous drip

charging like a box to numbing light.
You’re twenty-five, adrift in anesthetic fog

floating through the white sea of hospital hallways,
and you think of me, the living package

that changed your life. On the day of my arrival,
you were a month away from turning four.

While the buzz of anticipation swirled
around the airport terminal, your small body

perched high, anchored in the crook of our father’s arm.
So this is how babies are born,

you thought, and everything was yellow.
Scuffed linoleum tile. Blur of fluorescent lights

hovering above you. How you must have imagined
my body rattling in the box during transport

as our mother scurried
to the airport bathroom to snap my joints

into place. Today, we laugh about what you said.
We laugh until we forget why we’re laughing.

---

Tiana Nobile is a recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and a poetry fellowship from Kundiman. A finalist of the National Poetry Series and Kundiman Poetry Prize, she is a Pushcart Prize nominee and the author of the chapbook, The Spirit of the Staircase (2017). Her writing has appeared in Poetry Northwest, The New Republic, Guernica, and The Georgia Review, among others. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana. For more, visit www.tiananobile.com.