Display Case, Undone

I put on black

and dance

in a museum

of girls,

their eyes preserved

behind smudged glass,

skirts shredded and dry

like autumn leaves

at dusk.

They are posed

shoulder to shoulder,

bent into one

perfect curve,

like a glimmering train

eroding in stillness,

laden with lace air, polyester.

My grandmothers

remain encased

among the taxidermized lilies—

the wall text reads

what if we are not

building people anymore.

I cease my daughter

disease. I exit

the cramped body

in which I was raised

to belong.

Gaby Garcia is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet whose work has appeared in North American Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She is a James Hearst Poetry Prize finalist, “Best of the Net” nominee, founder of the podcast On Poetry, and served as a Lucie Brock-Broido Teaching Fellow at Columbia University, where she received her MFA in poetry. She lives in Brooklyn.