Easter Sunday it is warm enough to go out in the garage barefoot,
calluses on concrete,
a temporary and permanent roughness
like the cracked dollhouses stacked next to the weed whackers,
plastic relics of lives left behind,
left to gather dirt and grass shavings and scornful thoughts,
about how everything is just junk that accumulates, that rots like peaches.
You say that you don’t even remember what you used to look like,
mumbling into the glow of the tv droning infomercials for
the cause of the week—bulking or thinning or depraving—
and that week I don’t hear your confessions,
just like I don’t see you take those pills in your room.
But, in the space between our rooms, our childhood home,
I do see your feet, padding barefoot,
at three in the morning, the sky still swollen shut,
still awake, I see you, siphoning beer into water bottles,
like you’re six and hiding gum wrappers under the veneered cabinets,
you’re shivering in the garage, eyes glazed asleep,
your alien eyes, pupils darting like water skippers,
we used to skip stones on the school pond,
whispering theories about adulthood like they burnt our tongues raw,
a good burn, the first forkful of dinner kind of good,
and now all you want is to retreat, regress, devolve until you’re undone,
but the pond’s all still with algae and marooned fishing lures,
and you ask me what I am doing here,
shaking hands and thoughts like venom,
familiar venom like rosehip like camomile like dill on cucumbers,
your spring hymns slurred by dad’s cheap booze.
Laura Filion writes, lives, and pretends to drink coffee in Brooklyn. She is a recent graduate of New York University, where she studied Comparative Literature and French.
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