Memories I May Have Had (Sister: One)

First Draft

Memories I May Have Had

Sister (One)

She sent me a text

to ask me why

I only have a brother

when I write.

As if

there were some

intention behind that.

Even though

the time period involved

would make her three

or four. Five at the outside,

and the only memories I have

of her at that age are spotty at best.

In pictures she has bangs

(a variation of the haircut

we boys had,

the bowl but longer on the side,

framing her smiling face

like a cartoon of a smiling

little girl with an inverted parabola

for hair).

She sent me a text

to ask me why

I only have a brother

when I write.

But my memories of her

are so entwined with

his that when I write of him

I'm implicitly writing of her:

coming home from the hospital

and my displacement from my bedroom,

a thirteen year diaspora

wherein I shared a room with the same boy

who had stormed into the room that had been mine

before it was hers

and stomped my lincoln log house,

razed it, clear cut logs scattered across the ground.

And then she was there,

pink from the hospital,

in a basket in the living room,

and we wondered where she'd come from,

and how,

and watched her grow

until one day she was in college

and we were in our late twenties

and she texted me

to ask why

when I write

I only have a brother

the same brother

who was my partner

in crime, when she cried

and cried

half the day

and we reached into the medicine cabinet,

looking for something to stop the crying,

mother was doing who knows what

and finding the Ambesol that we somehow knew

was for soothing the pain of her teething jaws,

reached over the side of the crib and rubbed it

over her bleeding gums and went back to our room.

but the crying didn't stop so reaching over her crib

again we rubbed it into her torn flesh

and again, squeezing the tube until

mother found us

and put a stop to our well intentioned overdose.

this poem is for the sister

that texted me,

wondering why

when I write

I only have a brother.