Sun Story Sundays is taking a quick pivot this week, featuring poetry instead of fiction. Guess everything in the world has been turned on its head, huh? Submissions can be sent to [email protected]. The audio component of this story can be found here.
Inter Change
*
Pair.
My brother, my son
Asks for the Good Samaritan again
Is our home neighbor the same Neighbor
As your America neighbor, Didi?
An absinthe-marinated liver kind of fiend
Who touches girls the way he wrestles bulldogs
Makes me America sick from stale vapors
The way vomit makes you want to vomit and pray
For him, your neighbor, at the same time.
*
Portrait.
A Fourth of July barbeque in the Outer Banks,
The oil, the thirst, the sea.
My brother’s shrieks of laughter pouring
From his small mouth, watching the crab scuttle in circles
Around itself like a broken windup-up toy.
Fireworks unshell, knock
The wetness out of mothers and
Fathers out of dirty reverie –
Images of their neighbors dissolve and
Piss begins to flow again.
The startled crab halts and my brother quiets and
They both fold their legs, the crab beneath its discolored
Shell, my brother beneath his narrow hips,
Their black eyes seizing the other
In silence, in thirst, like the sea.
Father approaches, the crab disappears
In the sand in a blip in itself;
God knows, the crab knows, the way we live.
My brother, my son
Asks me if the crab found its way home alright,
Shorely.
Here you can either
Be a priest, a Samaritan, or a little boy.
*
Mark & Luke, a baby.
Old wine will burst new wineskins and
The wine will be lost and so will the skins
Because new wine is for fresh skins,
And old wine has no place
Like a son’s head on his sister’s shoulder,
but he, a lawyer, desiring to justify himself –
My brother, my son
Desiring to justify me, pretends to be asleep.
*
Didi, can I come with you? So we can be neighbors?
*
Homeward.
I fall asleep in America with one of those books
That makes you dream about a house
“And its somewhere you know, but altered,
Full of strange new [terrifying] rooms.”
The fire in the hearth of the house stands up
And walks along the carpet
Hunting for the portrait of my family
To prove that fire takes better to oil
Than we do.
Asleep, I slipped into the walls of the house,
Trying to be the nail that holds the portrait
In place, the way one kisses their mother goodnight
To dull their fears of sleeping alone.
I wake far out in the sea I know, the Caribbean sea –
Mother, father, my brother dancing with the crabs on the shore
And I, watching
Voice liquid, sunburned back face fingers,
Paddle.
*
Portrait II.
My America, who is my neighbor?
He vomits and hangs his tongue like a beat dog,
Like he’d said his last prayer, like his tongue
Was of no use anymore and tired,
His fists in tight balls, as if he were clutching his own name
Or a sister he had before she ran away.
He learned the road to Jericho is just a road,
And that Jericho is just America,
And that America is just another ashen room.
I vomit.
Acknowledging Robert Montgomery
Nisha Jain is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. Comments may be sent to [email protected]. Sun Story Sundays appears alternate Sundays this semester.