Easter came late that year.
An April forlorn, beleaguered by poppies.
The April that aged us — just five months before
The eleven-shaped towers fell —
I learned that flowers can kill you.
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Imagine you’re 11 years old
And first hearing about morphine
And “mental illness,”
The context, though, is death,
So this knowledge hits
Intravenously. High-stakes.
Sped-up.
This is not an innocuous school child’s lesson.
Not hardly the way they’ve planned it.
And mother couldn’t explain it away
Without saying “drugs.”
Plainly, redundantly,
“Drugs.”
​​
Here I was, tethered to the doorway, smothering,
Innocence dinged up with every word —
Then all of a sudden
The dirge —
“Jesse’s gone.”
You could feel the steely pang,
The injected shock of it all —
Needling its way through both arms,
Pierced elbow-deep in empathy, quashed grief —
While hearing her talk of opiates.
“No, he’s not.”
Meanwhile, moving boxes sulked, pathetic,
Open but packed full,
Circling me on all sides as my feet clenched the carpet.
All this talk of poppies made me dizzy:
How could you have the audacity
To die in a way
I didn’t understand?
You really should have seen our mother.
She was distraught, deep in
What I know now to be
Freeze response: “We’re still moving tomorrow.”
Duty calls, and nothing made as much sense then
As motion.
​
They must have ignored the door markings
On this lame-duck house,
Because everything my mother feared —
The flower-latex,
The lost firstborn,
The whole amorphous hell —
Failed to pass over us that evening.
​
This was my brother,
Gone at twenty-five,
Overdose.
Dying that April morning,
Hours before we woke.
One of the dead
Of the dead of the night.
​
A half brother, but in no ways half,
Handsome, ever-divided by mania,
Depression, mania, depression, mania.
He, wholly ours, now
Torn asunder from the anguished —
Hunched breathlessly here around the
Brown living room
Besieged by brown boxes.
​
He was very much here two weeks ago…
What happened?
The first and only time I ever went fishing was with him.
We got a picture made together,
A small, cruel mercy —
He hugged me,
And I wore a red handkerchief
That tightens every time I see it.
​
What could I have said mid-float
To change his mind?
The water was still, and we had
All the time to talk, I thought.
There’s always another trip, too.
But no, here we were with a mom
Desperately gaunt, feigning strength.
​
He played this song
That clashed with the day’s tune,
Of that laughing Tennessee lake.
Strangely, a favorite of his.
“I’m a loser baby” —
The chorus sang…
But I found what was on the end of that line
Much more macabre, dangerous,
When sung out loud.
Because who would have ever thought that you,
You, with the bay’s eyes,
Would get caught —
By something that you’d kept silent
And couldn’t release?
​
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© Maggie McCombs 2024. All Rights Reserved.