My sister and I
stand barefoot on the radiator,
our lacy night dress
scratchy against our shins.
Delicious jitters
as we clutch the high window sill.
Night touches our bodies
freed from sheets tucked in too taut.
A flash of light splits the dark,
spiders down
electric blue. Thunder
shakes the room.
It’s close.
All day, a sultry silence
filled our house,
thickened the air
between our parents.
I held my breath, tiptoed,
and them, waiting
for a spark.
Now, lightening zigzags.
Thunder claps onto my skin,
reverberates near my heart,
drums the fear,
loosened from my bones.
Another flash.
We count the seconds, One, two, three, four
thunder.
It’s moving over.
Fat drops of rain against the window.
Hand in hand, we jump down.
Giggling,
we find our beds inside the dark,
slide back
between the tucked-in sheets, between
the roles we play at day—
good daughter, bad daughter—
stolen pleasure
still bubbling up inside us,
the surprise of who we are.
The sisters we can be.
…
In her writing, Atma Frans searches for the voice beneath her personas: woman, mother, trauma survivor, queer, yogi, architect, poet. Her work has been published in The New Quarterly, Arc Poetry Magazine, Understorey Magazine, Obsessed with Pipework, and is forthcoming in The Dalhousie Review, among others. She lives in Gibsons, BC.
