Summary

Poem 22 refers to different stages of the speaker’s experience of disappearing – emptying her mother’s womb; realizing that her family likes daughters invisible, and behaving accordingly; and believing it when she is told she is nothing. She suggests the only reason she knows she is alive is the physical sensation of breathing. Title: “the art of being empty” (33). Drawing: the torso of a skeleton – rib cage, shoulder blades, spine, and pelvis.

Poem 23. In lines of dialogue, one speaker refers to “you” resembling her mother, but without her anger, while the first person responder refers to their similarities, but suggests that she (the speaker) gets her anger from her father.

Poem 24. The speaker suggests that her mother learned to be silent when, at dinner, the speaker’s father “shove[d] the word hush / between her lips and [told] her to / never...