Nebraska

I.

This is a story of memory and the lecher—memory,

in fact, like trick photography, canned peaches,

the magician’s coffin painted in pitch, but squirreled

with rooms, miscarriages, welts, and happy childhoods.

voilà! we are topographical and exotic when

the weather barges in, a Methuselan system:

a barometric mood hangs over a life for forty years—

painkiller unloosed from pain, feeling unloosed

from fact—it circulates through the heart,

II.

A hard bud like milkweed was pushing up

inside her, she didn’t ask for it, the bud

opened flap by flap, her girl-self,

an origami animal, unfolded into

something beautiful behind almond eyes,

something omnivorous, impatient to arrive.

She was the looker and the one with a temper.

Those years my sister hated our shit for family:

her fury a needle-prick of laser light,

our home the brittle leaf (already talented

prey, I could track father’s outrage and slip

away through cotton batting), I felt her bead

on my heart. My jaws tightened. The lash

began to stir. It happened to her.

Lecherous memory thrives—fed and watered

by shame so sweet to me then. Is there a word

for grinning and bearing it when

you’re happy through and through?

I let my sister stomach the whole thing.

A pilled orange sofa, a claustrophobic

den, the old smell of onions, my uncle

pulling on her hands. Are you sure?

I know, I remember, it happened. I told

her I’d take care of everything.

That night, opening the bathroom door

while I was still talking to it, our mother,

the Kabuki doll, taking care of everything.

III. Symbiosis

She cut herself, tried to jump from a third-story

window between classes, the milkweed cracked

long ago dispersing silk and golden scales.

She didn’t ask for it. The meantime

grew a missile, a second bud on the same stem,

no less wondrous in its undertaking: slam open

slam open slam slam slam: encyclopedias, china,

metronome, knives, they flew from her hands.

An unappeasable goddess, she feasted on havoc.

If she wouldn’t die she would be heeded;

her misery turned medusa murderous,

and our placid smiles hardened like concrete

as we rose higher on screaming pulleys and chains.

The fact is the memory never got out of our house.

The fact is my sister had always been an angry child.

IV.

Twenty years later, over the feeble uncle

she bends, his gray skin mottled blue, his neck

veins slack. We watch her brush his cheek

with hers, her children squirm in his lap.

It didn’t happen to us, this thing done,

but its weather curls around our spines.

This is a story of Nebraska in winter.

At Christmas dinner I told a friend about my only

opera: I was eighteen, my father took me

in my first evening gown, we sat in the balcony,

his shaving crème smelled like pineapple.

My mother put down her fork and said,

“That was me. Your father was already dead.”