49 | CEDARVILLE REVIEW Reach into the mirror with me. Dissolve the subtleties of you that are tattooed into me. Wipe them off. Ink over the veins that scream I am of you until they are the image of lost replication – severed hand-me-downs. There is a difference between inheritance and development, inheritance and creation. You created me to be useful, as a warm-bodied consolation to eradicate your loneliness, a vessel to deflect the contempt of your youth, an appeasement for your urges, a subject for your damning curiosities to explore. Your mistakes are etched in my back, and I request asylum from your genetic travesty. I know you were strapped down and made a canvas for the faults of those before you — the faults of those who loved you, conditionally — the test subject for the final copy. So it didn’t matter if they messed up or left gaps in their sketch. You swore you would never be the same, would keep only the best colors and images for us; you would not use a needle; you would use words, speaking the creation into our skin, filling us in completely. You would not waste color, not waste love. You crafted your designs with what you longed for and were denied. You scribbled out who left you, who hurt you, who claimed you and molded you rigid and stiff. I cannot carry the imprint on your lost desires, the narrative of another life. I don’t have enough skin to bear the images the needle is stuck on, the energy to tell your story by my flesh. Now the needle is dancing between absence and TATTOOS ARE NOT INHERITED HEIDIE RAINE
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