Brotherring

by Shae Savoy

 

BROTHERRING

Now they are men

but my brothers are children

in my memory, that’s where they

 

live my brothers, pounding dull bricks

into a fine red powder, smelting copper

pots of rotten stew thrown in the alley to

 

coagulate on Mars, my brothers.

Stout, beer-swilling men

who croon in the drunken

 

Kansas night, men removed

from the moon, from the elder

sister who bore them upon her

 

narrow elfen shoulders. Wee

chickadees without awning—

Eleven years old, I fluffed the nest.

 

These men are raising up their kindred,

rough-necked children who tackle one

another in the stiff grey grass, who call each

 

other pussy if tears sally forth.

One of these brothers took his bb gun,

his eyes hunted and wolf and I remembered

 

Cliff, our mother’s long-ago lover who took

care, who took of us while she deep-fried tacos

and tostada shells, down at the Rio cafe,

 

El Rio del Sol, the River of the Sun.

My brother, fourteen, shot out the window

of the blue Mitsubishi

 

Eclipse of my rapist. This brother now

grown, has a cyst on the side

of his face that pulses, that drums

 

of Xanax washed down with Bud won’t

shrink. And now the ring is broken.

I watched my brothers pufferfish

 

at the cold spines of our parents, while

my response was to shrivel, to invisibilize

and to slip through the heater vent

 

unseen, seeing.

My other little brother threw fists like rice

in the parade of ape-faced letter jackets that

 

sneered “dyke” at me. Now the ring

is broken. He carries lumps

of tobacco around in his lip, spits

 

a brown stream, sits armchaired in a house

full of paper plates and empty

of the wife who left him, nurses

 

cans of malted barley and in the wide

blue fields, stubborn heads of

wheat bristle with each passing truck.

 

–

Shae Savoy is an MFA candidate at Goddard College and she teaches at Bent Writing Institute in Seattle.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in J Journal: New Writing on Justice; Sinister Wisdom; Eternal Haunted Summer and the anthology Once Upon a Time. She blogs at shaesavoy.com.