My Brother, draining a velvet liquid, leaks solitude like honeycomb,
his lungs a rattling hive of wasps.
Sweating a milky sheen, pale on sterile ER tile, his sickness in a vial,
whisked away to be analyzed.
Read for omens, daemons, the kinds contracted from under the table
syringes and back-alley fluid exchanges,
where blood leeches’ blood and creations of habit lurk in dark fall.

My Brother, we never should have left the promised land of youth
rich with manna mud pies and copper water,
guzzled fresh out of frisbees, still metallic and cold from the clutches
of Mother Earth’s Garden hose,
and I knew you’d protect me, from older boys who, lacking empathy,
found my girlhood unamusing.
If I could, I’d return the favor, grab the rusted nine-volt battery
we scavenged from the roadside,
and lob it in the back of this disorders’ head, so his bike wheels hitch
and he tumbles over the front,
a spiral staircase windmill of dislocated limbs and flailing spokes.

My Brother, I owe you an apology because you kept me steady,
as a purring wasp landed on my shoulder.
Because, when I was fourteen, I opened up your nightstand drawer
and saw piles of dead wasps,
drained, stingers broken off, but since I had my own secrets to protect,
I told no one, and tried to forget.
Now years have passed, and I am preoccupied in some altered state,
when you, unable to stand anymore,
collapsed into an absence of arms, on a distant hospital room floor.

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