Poetry

You moved next door the first year I got left back, a month after someone clocked me in the eye
with a rock. Someone called my name, and when I turned, half the world went dark. My little
brother from another, I still see you in that bright half. Though three years apart, we fixed into
orbit around each other like binary stars. It wasn’t long before we were wailing on each other.
You’d sock me in the cheek just below my eyepatch, and I’d wrench you into headlock. I’d
throw haymakers after a shove, the bullied becoming the bully. Before you,

I was the ragdoll of the block, there to absorb the rage of bigger boys. Unable to sever fists from
love, I hit you harder than I meant to, and you went sobbing to your mom. Like an avenging
gunslinger, she cut me off at the pass, that small space between sidewalk and the steps to my
porch. This was in the days

of belts and the backs of hands, wet washcloths, and even extension cords drawing welt lines
across ours backs and asses. I readied myself for all four. You know how far a kid neck had to
crane just to see her face, so high up she may as well have been Christ on his cross—an oak to a
blade of grass. I didn’t cry. The pain to come was my pain to take because pain is what I
deserved. Instead,

she took a knee to look me in the eye, squeezed me by the shoulders to hold me in place, and
said big brothers don’t hit little brothers. She waited until recognition dawned in my face. It did,
then she kissed me on the forehead. I never laid hands on you again. Not even if you puffed up
and stepped to me. Not even after you left-crossed me in my bad eye after your alchy pops
disappeared for good. You swung, I blocked. You kicked, so I dodged. Then we played wallball.
Remember

those Christmas times? You always came over to see the lights my pops put up, rainbowed
blinking from front door to back? He was a beater, not a drinker. You didn’t want to play, just
wanted to look. Sometimes you’d sleep over and bust on me because I wouldn’t let you turn off
the lamp in my room. I’d try to describe how the dark wasn’t just on the outside but inside, too. I
didn’t have the words, so all you saw was a boy too old for a nightlight.

I wasn’t there when you killed that dude. I had moved away before your teen growl set in. What
thought flashed in the flash of the shot as you squeezed that single second into forever? The last
time I saw you,

you were fifteen. You seemed to be waiting for some words I didn’t have. I could’ve told youab
out the time I went looking for Bobby Moran with a sharpened screwdriver. He sucker-
punched me in the back of the head while sitting in the bleachers at Hetzel’s Field. Me and the
crew I ran with stalked the neighborhood looking for him. Visions of the shiv

disappearing into his belly clawed my insides out. Somewhere between here and there, George,
my only friend in that place, leaned to my ear and whispered, Dude, jet! We spotted Bobby alone
in Newt’s Playground. I took off in the other direction instead, and they chased until I got too far
away. If I had reached to pull you back, little brother,

would you have taken my hand? Your moms tried, sending you every summer to your granny.
Your brother tried, too, before vanishing into his girl and college. There’s some things only your
boys can do. Thirty-years too late, I stare at the lamp in my twilit room. All night it’s on, brother.
All night.