He tells me how to sing her song
I teach him how to forget
To lose your grip on her face,
On her hands, on how she looked
Smiling at the door

Our mother was a dreamer,
Our father the dream
In that he existed only at night
When the wine came out
And her voice whispered thick throat
Of the stories with monsters and dragons and an iron-clad hero
He was the hero and he was the dragon
But he was the monster all along, wasn’t he?
The monster that she saw beneath her bed
As trembling hands jerked,
As white pills made their somber procession
Slowly down her throat.

It was messier, really,
Was frothy white vomit
And teeth clacking hard against each other
And the blood from her tongue,
Caught between the snapping teeth,
Dribbling down her chin.
Still, she looks under her bed
Because the monster there
Is a comfortable fear
Is what will be waiting for her
On the other side of the door.

Brother my brother remembers
Her smile,
Her glass-and-mirrors voice,
Humming to an empty house,
To the dirty laundry tucked carefully behind closed curtains,
To her red cracked hands as she rinses stained dishes,
To our one-eyed cat sitting there on the counter

Funny,
That he doesn’t remember
The festers of cigarette butt burns
On her fleshy white arms,
The twitch of her skin-and-bone hands
For what she couldn’t buy but would never reject,
That she’d walk to the grocery store barefoot
For a jug of milk
And cut her dry feet
On broken glass
And leave bloody footprints down aisle three

What is there to say
To the whimpering-eyed congregation
Of vaguely known family
And once-in-a-while friends?
He tells me:
You have to love her.
To Brother, maybe:
Did she love me?
My optimism is strobed, it comes and goes,
But I can’t believe him when he says
That she gave her shoes
To our one-eyed cat
Because it liked to sleep in them
With a rumbling purr for no one to hear
When he says that the jug of milk was for me
Because she saw that I’d let my cereal stew in it
Only so it’d flavor the cream sweet enough to drink,
And that when it was gone,
I put dry cereal in a dry bowl
And tap my spoon against its confines slowly,
Rhythmically,
Relentlessly.

I tell him
LIAR
He tells me lies are just a form of twisted truth
Twisted is true; twisted is the feeling of mourning a woman
That I hated and loved and hated
He sees the look in my eyes,
The press of my nails against the palm of my hand
And says don’t lie:
Sing her song.

Her song,
What is her song?
Is it rusty needles and broken bottles?
Five-day-old shirts with twelve day-old-stains?
Is it her lies, but then what is a lie?
Is it what she told herself those red wine nights?
Who she looked for as she gagged on her own mistakes?
Is it the fact that she had let him go,
Or the fact that she never would?

But my brother looking at me
Is like looking into a moment
That was a memory before it even happened.
In his eyes I see our mother,
Our thin-and-grin mother,
Barefoot because the cat sleeps in her shoes,
Dirty shirt because of the last time she attempted to cook,
Freshly dirty shirt because she’s trying again now,
And
She sings.
Loud enough for the curtain to lift away from the window
For the cat to wake with slit-eyed questioning
For my brother and I
To run the rest of the way down the hall
To where she meets us with her
Red-lipped smile
Her hand reaches out
For us this time
And we take it
So that we might sing her song too

I look
At the group of people who’ve come too late
And I tell them this song,
Of when she was young
Beautiful
Lovely
Because it’s easier
To lie
Until it doesn’t even feel like a
Lie.