Sometimes I forget there was an empty space
where my son’s body is now, a time before
his hair fell like a curve of coastline.

When he was fourteen, I knitted socks,
the shape of his feet pushed into being row by row.
The socks were real before I cast the first stitch,

real as the grown man folded inside my son
and the son who lived in the gyri and sulci of my brain
before his cells multiplied into emptiness.

It’s the origami of inside.
A microscope’s lens reveals
yarn’s complex fibers of twisted strands.

I closed the toe, snipped the yarn, wove in ends
and could not stop my son’s threads unraveling
as he pulled himself apart and together,

as he grew into the space
where an invisible man lived beside me
unseen for years.