15 May Blown Birthday Candles, by Meadow Donnelly-Gilman
Are you a sinner?
Cain and Abel pass plates at dinner.
Stepping onto the bus with that blue knapsack,
Mom’s back, smashed,
from the pressure of trying to keep you upright.
Dad yelled ‘cause you ran up the phone bill again.
On the bus after school,
A girl told me that you got into speed.
I barely knew what she meant,
but my cheeks got hot and I knew I had to save you from it.
From the constricting vine of time (the one spreading up your thigh),
I asked Mom about it that night on creaky porch steps,
her overturned ship of a face angled towards the garden.
Under her eyes, the worn lumber grooves of time.
And a cigarette flagpole hanging from her lips.
Dad said never set foot inside
the Pontiac Sunfire parked on the lawn.
Only Mom and Dad can drive you from now on,
transferring the bright pink pill found on the closet floor, from my fist to his.
But you’re too sleepy to cook when you babysit and we have nothing to eat.
I hit a skunk, you said.
I pinched my nose, buckled my seatbelt.
It always smells like skunk, I thought.
Tubes from my paint set splattered across the dash,
borrowed for another sentimental craft,
for another of your girlfriends I loved like a sister.
I cried when each of them left you.
Sailboats braving the trip to the mainland,
Leaving behind used cosmetics and clothes but taking with them the sensation of gentle hair-combing and a fluffy makeup brush on my cheeks.
Waving from the shore with tear-streaked eyes, I was secretly glad they got away from you.
By the time the cast came off, you were gone.
They sawed right through your sharpie smile,
it was severed ink on plaster,
just like how Mom didn’t ask her
daughter,
why flowers were drawn around a hole in the wall,
why there was a hole in the wall.
But recently I saw you.
In the pocket of grass-stained jeans, your phone,
Probably the same one that wished me a happy 16th birthday four days after I had turned
eighteen.
Nothing on your head but a black cap, a snapback!
Of your right hand on my cheek, just a week after my tenth birthday.
I haven’t seen you in four years, we’re in Walmart now.
Together.
By coincidence.
The wheels of my cart jam beside the T-bone steaks,
do you remember the screech of brakes?
Splintering shards from the cracked-glass web,
The Grand Slam of our genogram,
Isn’t it easier to lie instead?
I don’t remember when I first said your name.
Wet fingers curled around crackers on a high chair tray.
When did I start calling you my half-brother?
Leaning into our sister’s seat to tell her that I love her.
I saw Dad’s rearview eyes from the backseat,
Mom was always telling us that he couldn’t look past it.