by Katharyn Machan
My Brother
My brother lives in a box of cigars.
Each day every day
he lifts the lid to peek at the world
and hopes the world won’t notice.
Bristles grow on his face and throat.
He smells, fears soap.
He never throws his loose hairs away
but carefully keeps them, dirty and dark,
in the teeth of a green plastic comb.
Long ago he spent years committing incest.
I survived but we never mention it.
He’s thirty-five now and still lives with our mother. My favorite joke when I visit is to talk
of the time I stabbed his thigh with a fork
and sent him screeching around the table
for ruining my first perfect crayoned picture.
We pretend to laugh and the scar
does not go away. Migraine headaches
take me back to the fork, to the fort
he built under cool pines
where he wouldn’t let me visit
unless I would...and I did.
Now he does his best to repel.
He rots his teeth, sucks his cigars,
growls and belches and grows fat.
Each night every night
he grows a little smaller inside.
One morning my mother, weeping,
may find he’s flickered out at last,
a small gray heap in an ashtray.
I’ll visit, leave the jokes behind,
bring instead a perfect crayoned picture
to wrap around his coffin.
Virgin Poem
If we lived in the South Sea long ago,
brother, you might have been husband
or lover, taking me in the flowered tent
in ritual, at the festival.
My friends would have brought me shells
and coral, combed my fine brown hair
back from my face, giggling
to think of kisses there. To think
of you, older brother, striding into the tent
to find me there on the sweet soft cloth
stretched upon the sand, my breasts
years from blossom, my hips
straight and narrow as a young palm.
Oh, your manroot there. Your hands
tender and gentle with knowledge
taught you by the village fathers,
tradition, protecting me from evil
spirits that would gather to my hymen.
You would hurt me, yes, but you
would recognize my pain, acknowledge
tears, go on loving me as clean
little sister, and I would know
the pain would end and leave me whole.
How different, brother, in this northern land
where you tore my flesh and left me broken,
dirty secret, shameful sister
knowing eight years into life
love is a jagged island of ice
where flowers never grow.