Men

I showed my mother my arm
with its three tear drops of bites
falling down it
when she spotted two from beneath my sleeve
—red with nail marks—
and asked to see the others.

She frowned,
fingering the invisible line
that connected all three,
and said,
“Bed bugs.”

One bite was bigger than all the others
so I named them: Saturn,
Uranus, Neptune.

This reminded me:
my sister stopped wearing shorts
because of a patch of freckles on her leg.

In third grade she learned about
the Solar System
and a boy, pointing to her leg, said,
“It looks like the Milky Way”—
which hurt her feelings
forever.

Saturn is the same size as my friend’s
pockmark on her arm
she got from the smallpox vaccine.
I remember in gradeschool I would constantly
press my finger to it and say,
“Ring, ring!”

“They itch,”
I complained
while sawing at my arm.

“Go put some rubbing alcohol on it, then,”
my mother instructed.
“And from now on
stop reading on your sister’s bed.
At least not at night.”

The Doctors eventually excised the Milky Way
from my sister’s leg.
Not for cosmetic reasons
but because they said something so big
could only lead to cancer.