Ode to My Pectus Excavatum

or my sunken chest, visible each time

I bow my head in prayer, my own body

falls in on itself, my heart a sinkhole,

a cenote. I trace my breastbone

with my fingers, feeling the air

where the ribs should be, and I recall

in the locker room, changing out

of my gym clothes, the boy who said

you could eat a bowl of cereal out of

my chest. And maybe he’s right—

maybe I have made a meal of my heart

and broken body. In a video my father

sends me, my nephew climbs into

my father’s bed to wake him up,

then blows on his stomach, laughing

at the noise. With his shirt up, I can see,

even through the grain of the video,

my father’s own sunken chest, a valley

where no crops will grow. I spent

years inside the empty cathedral

of my father’s chest, years building

each pew from a tree fallen every storm.

Years thinking if my body matched

my father’s, then I must be him. That I had to

become him. I spent years unlearning this.

From the angle of the camera, there is

a shadow on his breastbone, as it

rises and falls in the morning light.

As a child, I laid my palm into

the indentation of my father’s shirt.

He said our nightly prayers should be

of thanks. I cannot praise my body

while within it. I cannot remember

the trees until the trees become memory.

When I kneel, I see only the shadows

carved in my chest, so I am distracted

by my own inadequacy, the sound

of the cardinal in the front yard.

I cannot give thanks for what I’m not

thankful for. And so when I pray I pray

for a better chest, one larger, one that

can hold my father and I within it.

I pray for rainwater to gather in the gutters

of my bones, in the hollow of my center.

I pray that if I can’t leave this cave

of my body—if the light from above

only plays off the water and the limestone—

I make within it a home.