Best Poems Written by Gabrielle Purdy

disfigured

A poem about the recent loss of my identical twin sister. I love and miss you, sis...

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there were two of me
once

not in the way people mean
when they talk about reflection
or similarity
or matching outfits in photographs

i mean two heartbeats
that learned each other
before language
before memory
before the world could name us separate

you were not beside me
you were with me
woven through one another
a second nervous system
a quiet, constant knowing
i never had to reach for


blue eyes
identical to mine 
but still entirely yours 

and now

reality keeps insisting
i am singular 

as if that is not an amputation

as if i have not been bisected
without anesthesia 

in a way that leaves no clean edge
no visible place to point and say
“this is where she was.”

i walk around
with an invisible wound

something missing

mutilated

i was torn apart
and whatever held me together 
went with you 

people look at me
and see a whole body

but i feel

disfigured 

expected to live
without a vital organ


who am i
without the person
who made me make sense

who am i
without the witness
who knew me before i became
someone existent

they tell me
you are still here
in my laugh
in my hands
in the small, indescribable things

but that feels like
being asked to accept fragments
as a whole

i don’t want traces
i want what was ripped from me 
as something outside of me
someone i could turn toward
someone who could look back
and lay your head on my shoulder 

not this silence
stitched over
where you used to be 

nerve endings exposed
left this way

there is no buffer
to help make sense of the world

turned inside out
like all the parts meant to be protected
are suddenly visible

and still

somewhere beneath the damage
beneath the wrongness of being only one

there is a thread
that did not break

i feel it

in the quiet moments
once filled with your voice

not gone
just unreachable

like a room in a house
i no longer have the key to

there were two of me

once

and even now

in ways i cannot prove

or properly survive


there still are.

Copyright © Gabrielle Purdy | Year Posted 2026