as Ourselves
Never imagined we would have forgotten how to treat a stranger.#
#AmericanSentence
My mother demands I share my location with her
because I’m leaving the country.
An app on my phone becomes a digital leash.
I nearly killed myself throughout my twenties
but now she suddenly gives a fuck where I am.
When I was having panic attacks in my
parked car at night
all through my freshman year,
trust that she did not care.
“I’m going to know where my child is,”
she says to me.
She brags it to her friends,
showing off her control.
I nearly fell into selective mutism
after college
because I felt so angry and invisible.
She has never known where I really am.
For the first time in four days
I woke not completely
Obliterated by depression
No noose around my neck
No chain to my step
More roses than thorns
Thunder and horns
Father’s Day has passed
Two text messages from
Two sons was the only gift
No word from my father
In decades and decades
Before that more silence
His lost is my detachment
Life’s funny disorder
There was nothing unique
About growing up in the
90’s father-less
But unlike the cicadas cry
Cycles break and I pass on
No fatherless existence
And I take the hits
Privilege goes unappreciated
But what would be worse is
The guilt of knowing I made
Anyone grow up feeling
As I felt
A forgotten burden
An unloveable storm
A ghost
A curse
Spilling heart out with
Knuckles to dry wall
Shot out car windows
The slamming of a red door
The amount of fear a small
Child can carry is tremendous
Some will take sips
Other will take a puff
But it’s never enough
Until you fill the hole
In your chest that our
Parents left
And those chains rot away
When I hug my sons and
It’s like Spring again
We stand tall as the three
Pillars of a new home
He liked to believe that
The narrative of his life
Followed some meaningful,
Discernable arc.
But the closer he got
To the end,
The more people he knew
Who died long before
There was any recognizable plot.
They just died
Right in the middle of their story.
As though death
Was not some great culmination
But an inconsequential blip
In someone else’s saga.
Maybe he is not the star of his own story.
Maybe he is just an extra on the set
Of someone else’s epic.
Or maybe a foreign film,
A language he does not speak,
Blundering around the set
In a costume that does not fit.
, and the shitty mascara
that you got on clearance
one night after work.
They call you too much.
Dark glitter eyeshadow,
and an eyeliner wing that could kill a man
is all you need to feel yourself
when the detatchment creeps in.
Call it something to survive.
Teenage me: the boys
i looked into the deep brown eyes of a sad basset
he paused ~ breathed lightly with a heavy sigh
tilted his head ~ eyes reaching up to heaven . . .
i look at my new friend and wonder what it’s like
to live in a shorter than short world . . .
with a keener than keen snout . . .
he cocks his head and begins to speak . . .
“You know, we teach people how to treat us . . .” he drools
looking into his eyes i smile . . .
“thank you Mr. Basset, i shall remember your wisdom!”
“You can call me Bogie . . .”
“Thanks Bogie!”
The heat bleeds through me, reminds me of the summer
when I was little, littler, barefoot in the cul-de-sac with my sister
and screaming as we ran from our little brother,
smiling as he chased us with a gun full of water.
Like I could listen to the birds and bugs, a song
I could never forget, heard every time I look through a photo.
But why are you not there? You’re missing, the hand in the edge of the photo,
just out of frame, but you were gone that summer,
just like always, like every season. I listened to your favorite song
and it was like you were there, in the colors of my sister,
the sound of her voice, singing, splashing in the water
while we waited for you. Did he miss you, our little brother?
The same colors, shared, in the hair and the eyes and skin of my little brother,
but not shared in time spent. I took all of them, and still another photo
where we had to miss you. Ignore the stains, teardrops, or water
from a sprinkler, maybe. Aren’t those things you do, during summer?
Cry and stand in the hot rain? I did. We did. And I was not a sister
when you left. I wasn’t, not to you and not to me. You hated that song
but I loved it. It could’ve been ours. It wasn’t. Just another song
you change the channel from. I always wanted you to be a better brother,
one at all. I thought it would be nice, to be a little sister
for once. Go back to when nothing was complicated, another Halloween photo
with our arms around each other, you, a vampire, me, a mermaid. Back to summer
when I screamed at the fireworks and you laughed. Back when it didn’t have to be water
under the bridge, under anything at all. It could just be water
in a Scooby Doo sippy cup that we passed back and forth, the theme song
loud in our ears and the VCR. When time was golden and slow, summer
soft like grass under our feet, hot pavement, fascinated by our new brother
and in awe of his soft head. When dad took his camera everywhere, every moment a photo
to be developed. Aren’t you glad? We can look back on that. When sister
and brother were brother and sister.
Before we grew and it all grew with us, swollen like the world’s angriest water
balloon over our heads. Do you remember the last time we stood together, for a photo
no one had to force? The last time we sat and didn’t argue about everything, when a song
was just a song and not a sticking point? When it was funny to pick on our brother
and he was something to be shared? When was the last time we played, in the summer?
I want more and better photos, like the soft kind I can share with our sister.
I want cool nights in the summer, feet dipped in at the edge of the water.
I want to know your favorite song, and I want to know an older brother.
