you like guns. once your stepfather shot off his own finger with a gun. the newspapers called it a domestic dispute. your mother laughs about it. your mother has a tattoo of a butterfly for her mother. your mother loves a vodka-cran, gave me my first menthol two days before I turned sixteen but asked your permission first.
the dogs are in heat. they stick together in the backyard.
your mother’s dead mother smiles through cigarette smoke in a photograph from the week of the funeral.
the downpour washes out the yard. washes out the sound. your stepdad says gators down there by the mailbox, uh huh. florida shivers over the house, beats at it like so many angry little fists.
we watch TV in the dark and wonder when the power will go out. thunder scrapes the floor of the sky. our two shadows stick together until someone walks by.
—
your mother’s gone.
and the dogs burrow under the house. your stepfather threw his fist through the window. your sister threw a chair through the wall. I told you that you should have picked through the things in her closet, but none of us except I guess a part of me knew your stepfather would get drunk and burn it all with the backyard.
when you call your brother and tell him she died, it is a bit less embarrassing than when you called your brother and told him we had nowhere to sleep.
there is nothing like a florida sky, a lightning strike slashing cold white suicide lines through the bodies of the clouds. we deflate with the air mattress and welcome the thunder through the bedroom floor.
your mother visits you in your dreams while lava lamp shadows seep through the walls.
we go outside when everyone’s asleep to sample what the universe is trying to sell us. three hard lemonades and a joint on the porch. I watch waxy green leaves creep along the fence line, imagine something might come crawling out to take us away. where, I don’t know. but it will take us away.
—
she waits until we aren’t asking for it. she flips a photo of herself over, draws curlicues through the dust on her cremation box. she takes the heart-shaped pocket urn the funeral home made for you and balances it on its side with a human precision that makes you so mad at me for believing in ghosts.
we are overexposed like photographs of when there were different deadlines, no bedtimes, no bruises from midnight fistfights.
just an unwound paper clip tallying times I cried on my arm. just hide and seek in a lightless basement curled up Not It in the rafter. just broken glass on a bedroom floor concrete and carpet swatch and pretending to know who we were.
I grew up in eight different basements but this is the last. in this basement you work, and I work, and the cat waits to be let in at the back door. it never rains. sometimes a mountain sunset is cotton candy. the sky changes shape, is shapeless.
you hang over the banister screaming maybe I’ll just move out, then and I tell you to fucking go for it, you can’t move out of yourself so good luck.
—
it is a gift to feel the life leave something in your hands. you weren’t there when it happened but that’s not your fault. it’s something to feel alone.
the only hide and seek in the dark we play now is the way your hand hides up my shirt and my mouth seeks your flush.
you look so damn good in a denim jacket, slow body-breathing against my spine when I sit on your lap and stretch out my toes to the gas. you hate the phrase jailbait. now that I’m older, too, I cannot blame you.
you screamed at my mother and she screamed back and I cried and she cried and you swallowed it.
at the dinner table sometime around midnight a cockroach crawled up over your shoulder. I laughed until I cried and so did you, eventually, after you ripped off your shirt to find it. I’m sorry. just this is one of my favorite memories of us.
just the way you looked at me from the bedroom doorway when I was sorry for cheating on you. just the way you looked at me from my knees the first time I came on your tongue. just everything you only ever say inverted.
we never did find that cockroach but at least it didn’t wake your stepfather up.
—
self-hatred hangs on you in spanish moss and blossoms like honeysuckle from my mouth. my mother sits next to your mother on the shelf.
the windows leak. so does the ceiling. the sky greens heavy as the bruised fruit I’m collecting by the russian teapot I never use.
I told myself I’d be good, but I never really listen when I tell myself to be good because there’s still this part of me that bruises when I feel like I’m missing out on something.
we are surrounded by someones who do not anymore exist. silver nitrate catches shadows and the shadows eventually swallow it.
we find home videos in an old box your stepfather didn’t burn. static rolls down the ghost of your first birthday. nothing left but everything on reels of moribund tape. you don’t look at me when you say It’s sad to say but everyone in that room is dead except me. I say I wish I got to meet your grandma and grandpa.
when I am alone on the road at night and the world’s widened out black and balmy as an open mouth, I remember things like how we’re all going to die one day and how I should add that to my to-do list.
you still like guns.
Jerico Lenk (he / him) writes poetry, prose, and everything unsung in between. His work can be found in F(r)iction Literary, Columbia Journal, Twyckenham Notes, and a handful of other journals both in print and online. He has received and/or been nominated for prizes such as the Pushcart, Best New Poets, Best American Short Stories, and the Walter Dean Myers Award, and was most recently selected to appear in the WA State Poet Laureate’s Queer Poetry Anthology project. You can find him at his website www.lenkcreative.com.