Marj Hahne: Fragments for an Identical Twin • Cleaver Magazine

Marj Hahne
FRAGMENTS FOR AN IDENTICAL TWIN

Cleave. Ends with leave. Let’s begin there. Because there includes here. Whenever you leave, I sense my own absence. Right before the last time you left, you screamed, “You got what you wanted! I’m here, aren’t I?!” I thought, Whose presence is this? Is yours mine?

Cleave (v.1): “to split.”

Cleave (v.2): “to adhere firmly or loyally.”1

You, the firstborn (b.1), first to press your feathery head into Mom’s cervix. I (b.2) kicked you out of the womb, a clairvoyant said. Because I needed some space: four weeks in an incubator at Booth Memorial Hospital. In the next box over, you hit five pounds in half the time, so Dr. Lewis let Mom take you home. My heart and lungs opened alone. Mom would press her face against the window of the neonatal unit while a nurse wheeled my hatchery over. Ten more ounces for freedom. Something to pump and wail for. A drink or a fuck is a kind of swaddling. To keep my limbs from flailing. To there, there my heart. Through a stethoscope, whooshes between beats. An innocent murmur.² A livable turbulence in my blood.

To calm the fuck down, I do yoga. Pigeon. Happy baby. Corpse: most challenging because it’s total relaxation. Puts the shh in shavasana. Lying still on the mat, I cry, all that oṃing and ahing working inside-out.

One twin needs the other twin more. Or so I read in One and the Same, written by journalist Abigail Pogrebin after her identical twin, Robin, pulled away in adulthood.³ In high school, my locker was next to yours, and because we had the same schedule junior year, we dressed up as conjoined twins for Halloween. We shouldered into Dad’s roomiest sweatshirt, my right arm in the right sleeve, your left arm in the left sleeve, and braided our hair into a tail. Our legs were our own, but, walking down the hall, we had to lean on each other. Traveling as one unit was easy for us, winners of the three-legged race during Groton Elementary Field Days. Binding our inside legs at the ankle, we trained in our sky-sized yard. Sights set straight ahead, we counted toward synchronized flight: One-two, one-two, one-two.

Alone in the dark, I fell for birds at the Fall Creek Theater: Winged Migration. Writer-director Jacques Perrin’s opening line like pillow talk: The story of bird migration is the story of promise—a promise to return.⁴ I’d been home, at Mom’s, after vacating my Manhattan sublet. The body knows when it’s time to go. When I drove the seventeen hundred miles to Colorado—seven-thousandths of the way to the moon—I put the double-V in verve. Not an echo, but a single sound leaving and returning.

I nod off at the opera. Does the there, there of hovering song make me drowsy, or does the rapid eye movement—from surtitle screen to stage to surtitle screen—make my brain think it’s dreaming? Poet Li Bai premiered here, at the Central City Opera House. One night, Poet, exiled on a houseboat, converses with his muses, Wine and Moon, about his life, his fall from grace. The Way’s open as the sky, as the sky / I alone cannot fly! Later, Moon beseeches him, Why not go home now? When Poet reaches out to embrace her celestial body, he disappears into the dark. That’s Moon’s reflection in water, sings Poem.⁵ A reversal of sky.

When Mom’s water broke seven weeks early, Dr. Lewis took an X-ray of her belly. “You don’t have one baby in there, Norma; you have two babies in there.” Wriggling to be born under the sign of the twins, we put the ee in preemie! Lounging under the sparkling dome of the Southern Cayuga Planetarium during the annual middle-school field trip, I couldn’t wait for the astronomer to progress the sky through the zodiacal constellations. Gemini overhead, he’d ask, “Do we have any twins in here?” Our classmates pointed at us. “When were you born?” he’d ask. “May 27th,” we’d answer. “My, my, you’re true Geminis!” We put the win in twins! When anyone asks, “What’s it like to be a twin?” I say, I don’t want to leave you in death, and I don’t want to be left.

The Aldabra rail lives again on four coral islands in the Indian Ocean, after the atoll it first evolved on vanished under the sea 136,000 years ago. Why didn’t these birds lift off from the flooding earth to save themselves? Well, no predators had inhabited the atoll, so their wings became vestigial. When the sea dropped 36,000 years later, the flightless rails reappeared on the atoll, putting the rah in iterative evolution.⁶ Being born two minutes after you makes me a kind of iteration, but that isn’t why I left. The body knows when it’s time to land.

The energy cords between people resemble roots: some thick, some bulbous, some like strands, some like spirals and hooks in and around the organs and bones. When cut at the body’s surface, they grow back bigger, stronger—like Cupid’s bowstring, like a hangman’s rope—so they need to be cleared. I run my hand in front of my body, from crown to crotch, clasp the spongy air, pull and pull—What is mine is mine. What is yours is yours.—forgive, and breathe in to fill the holes.

Once upon a time, a pigeon wearing a rhinestone-studded vest was sighted outside Phoenix. She’d flown out a car window and soared to a backyard ten miles away.⁷ At seven, I plotted to run away from home. I flew the coop to college, migrated to eight different theres. Here, where lake mirrors sky, I am two and one. One-two. Three. I breathe the V in cleave. I wing and fin and grieve. Let us close with the sound of two oṃs. Poem. Home.

Marj Hahne is a freelance editor, writer, and writing teacher, and a 2015 MFA graduate from the Rainier Writing Workshop, in poetry. She has performed and taught at over one hundred venues around the country, including public radio and television programs. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, anthologies, art exhibits, and dance performances. To make poetry hospitable, she reads poems to dogs and pairs poems with craft beers, spirits, and coffee for her YouTube channel. Her website is www.marjhahne.com