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My brother’s afflictions and mine

Patrick T. Reardon

He was a self-contained plague. He
had locust clouds in his brain. I
looked away — from him, from those
two who had no time for me except
to acolyte them. Deuteronomic
abominations get screen clicks, but
the afflictions inflicted on my
brother, quiet, unseen, twisted
him like dislocated branches on
woven living trees and wrenched his
free-will offerings and shaped,
daintily, his self-death — joke-butted
from infanthood, stuttered, a left-
handed cross to bear for mother and
father who had pressing preoccupations,
each other.

My brother tried and learned there was
no answer, no embrace. I looked away,
dodging side-step the steel-bar comedy,
enduring only small bone breaks knit
crooked. My brother’s bones — you
understand, it’s not the bones of which
I speak — were brutal curled, his tender
back electric pain, his head atwitch, his
feet and hands crushed under lessons he
could not help but listen, he hungered. I
looked 1000 miles away. From them. From
him.

Rage the whirlwind rain.
Face the void.

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