Courtney Justus
Carapace Inheritance
At birth you’ll be a lick of moon, a plump
silver skull with topaz lips, your lashes
like a fox’s whiskers. You’ll know me
by taste first, know softness before
knowing its name. We’ll walk the trails
at first light, walnuts cracking beneath
our feet. For you I’ll pick up every
shattered shell, dig my palms into every
bed of soil from my rock-strewn ocean town
to the backbone of Buenos Aires, to
the deserts of Salta and Jujuy where
a healer made me kneel until my hands
touched the earth.
Daughter, I have slim hands with fingers
bent like mis-welded metal. I cannot tend
plants like my mother, not the orchid
in its cream ceramic pot, not the peppers
nodding at the kitchen window. I left
my cosmos outside in the summer bluster
until storms carried the saplings far past
their beds. I cannot paint a canvas like
my grandmother before past suitors passed
her gate like watchmen. In my dreams they
are coat-clad men on horses. When I see
a man, my legs knock against each other
like ruddy oars.
My body knows how to cave and swell,
to push my seashell ribs open like an oyster
for you to finally scrape me clean. See my
insides now they are hollow. See I bite
my porcelain crown until the porcelain in me
cracks, until bone meets the crack like a fault
line, like the faults that lie in me, in my
overactive jaw. Daughter, what can I give you
but these roots, light at dawn and a copper fog
enveloping my back molar. I build a carapace
from my Persian shield, its violet leaves made
jagged with decay.
I am a tortoise with more softness than shell,
insides soft as a new tongue. I am not rosebud
or pine, not the orchid my mother points to
as it blooms in the night. I can offer geraniums
plucked from my throat but must first de-thorn
my missives. I grow this shell like an ocean
lapping at layers and layers of sand, its reach
expanding with each shedding of moon. I bubble
like topaz struck with shards of magma. Veins
of heat snake through me, make rivers but do not
take this hardness. I am carapace and amber, mothers
and daughters caught within me, floating beneath
my shallow shell.
May you carve a cave for the two of us, but always,
first, for yourself.
silver skull with topaz lips, your lashes
like a fox’s whiskers. You’ll know me
by taste first, know softness before
knowing its name. We’ll walk the trails
at first light, walnuts cracking beneath
our feet. For you I’ll pick up every
shattered shell, dig my palms into every
bed of soil from my rock-strewn ocean town
to the backbone of Buenos Aires, to
the deserts of Salta and Jujuy where
a healer made me kneel until my hands
touched the earth.
Daughter, I have slim hands with fingers
bent like mis-welded metal. I cannot tend
plants like my mother, not the orchid
in its cream ceramic pot, not the peppers
nodding at the kitchen window. I left
my cosmos outside in the summer bluster
until storms carried the saplings far past
their beds. I cannot paint a canvas like
my grandmother before past suitors passed
her gate like watchmen. In my dreams they
are coat-clad men on horses. When I see
a man, my legs knock against each other
like ruddy oars.
My body knows how to cave and swell,
to push my seashell ribs open like an oyster
for you to finally scrape me clean. See my
insides now they are hollow. See I bite
my porcelain crown until the porcelain in me
cracks, until bone meets the crack like a fault
line, like the faults that lie in me, in my
overactive jaw. Daughter, what can I give you
but these roots, light at dawn and a copper fog
enveloping my back molar. I build a carapace
from my Persian shield, its violet leaves made
jagged with decay.
I am a tortoise with more softness than shell,
insides soft as a new tongue. I am not rosebud
or pine, not the orchid my mother points to
as it blooms in the night. I can offer geraniums
plucked from my throat but must first de-thorn
my missives. I grow this shell like an ocean
lapping at layers and layers of sand, its reach
expanding with each shedding of moon. I bubble
like topaz struck with shards of magma. Veins
of heat snake through me, make rivers but do not
take this hardness. I am carapace and amber, mothers
and daughters caught within me, floating beneath
my shallow shell.
May you carve a cave for the two of us, but always,
first, for yourself.
Courtney Justus is a recent graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of North Carolina Wilmington and a Tin House 2022 YA Workshop alumna. Her adolescence spent in Buenos Aires, Argentina and her Argentinian heritage frequently inform her work across genres. She has been awarded residencies from Sundress Academy for the Arts and Weymouth Center for the Arts and Humanities. Her work appears in Sky Island Journal, Jet Fuel Review, The Lindenwood Review and elsewhere. You can find her on Instagram @courtneyjustuswriter and at courtneyjustuswriter.wordpress.com.