Draft Message to My Sibling After Top Surgery
I watched the video you sent of a roommate’s cat stealing
chicken nuggets, cracked up as paws swiped at the tray.
I know that all is well with you. It took so long
to realize we never learned to speak of joy, instead send
clips to make each other smile. All day I’ve thought about
care packages to send but nothing seems to fit. Nothing
I would send fits in a box, would last the thousand miles
to where I left you. It took so long to realize we both hoped
to escape from home and gender. Yesterday, I saw red admirals
flutter on a spicebush and tried filming them—because you
too float in graceful flight. Amid bruised ribs and drain tubes
you shimmer, iridescent. You’ve taught me how to dapple,
to be larger than our family’s worry. Let me gift to you a grove
of saplings, their young trunks primed for future. Watch them
rise and take in sun, leaves dancing in the breeze. From here
we’ll run off to the beach—the same one where as kids
you’d bury me in chest-high sand then tease of leaving.
This time, we’ll keep running past the waves—over them,
in spite of them—we’ll stay running at each others’ sides.
Since Moving from the Beach
What I miss most are boys who’d rip their skateboards
past me on the strand, eyes bright as new bearings,
warm with gloam. Miss boys who’d swerve from tourists
stopped dead-center, dodge the sandy dogs off leashes, jump
crushed vape pods. How they reached warp speed despite
all that tried to stop them. I miss the boy with red wine hair
and Texas Chainsaw calf tattoo I watched almost do a kickflip;
who biffed the landing, cracked his phone, who seemed so happy
being spectacle. Who seemed to part his lips the instant we passed
and invite me in his mouth, who in that instant let me live. I miss
how longing starts inside an instant, lives forever as a memory. I miss
boys making scenes the way I never could, who make me think
I could someday. Boys not offering their hearts but giving them
and moving on, who call that living. Life that I want, too.
