My sister gathers gemstones
the way I hoard my words.
She sits, I kneel, at her box of rocks,
and I test my stock against hers.

I pick up an amethyst — this
fistful of pixies
in a cystic crystal prison.

I’ve never met a purple so prismatic,
so cryptic, enigmatic.

She shows me clear quartz,
a hexagonal lattice of glass.

And the amethyst… is this, she says,
the same but stained with iron.

(It must be pixie blood:
see how it drips, and glitters.)

I see so much of myself in her.

I watch her study the stones
like an old museum curator,
a nine-year-old collector
and lover of the earth.

I see too much of myself in her.

She’s driven to this
out of something less innocent
than love. Out of a vicious insistence,
the blistering unanswered existence:

whether this world is magic
or just a victim to its tricks.