After His Bender, My Brother Takes Me Skydiving
In a few minutes, if we’ve managed to pull the parachutes, I will wrestle my brother into my embrace and repeat the truths which I am presently feeding to the wind: “I am miserable,” I will echo, “even the perfect peanut butter sandwich denies me joy!” Like twin umbilical cords, our suspension lines will tangle, and I will reveal the source of my sorrow: the sorrow he has created for himself yet speeds away from each morning with a gashed foot sliding on the steering wheel. “This is a bad idea,” I suggested before he swindled our parents to pay off his stacking legal fees and again before we tumbled out of the airplane which crested above quilted earth, but both times, he snickered, knife-sly, and winked. Now, from his jumpsuit, he fishes a skull-shaped flask, massages it with a tenderness I recognize though cannot place, and it’s bottoms up to my softening pleas, or perhaps the velocity of his fall. My lips mouth “I love you” and his body forward-dips to nosedive like a detonating missile. I ride the updraft as he plunges into thunderheads and forgive myself for the extent to which I’ve shadowed his disasters so I might floss the thorns from his teeth.
House Party Apocalypse 2008
In the kitchen, our chatter smacks
of underground tunnels,
lightspeed particle
collision, & a bag of Sunset Blush
torn from the Franzia box. I’m 19, a king
of losers without an alibi, ignorant
of quantum physics & negligent
to my unrefined sadness. I chug
Wild Irish Rose, as the microwave
sizzles NyQuil tablets into bursts
of blue lightning, & say “if The End’s
overdue, I’d prefer to spectate
lounging on a lawn chair at the riverbank,”
which, in the future, I’ll make to mean
I’d treat myself better if I revered
imminent death. My roommate
slings an arm around my shoulder,
plants a firecracker in my knotted
locks, & his spliff’s smoking cherry
nudges against the fuse. He wagers
I’ll lose my virginity should I survive
the decade, but he’s wrong. A pop
rings my ears accompanied
by sulfur’s stench while our host—
chanting a Bad Brains song—
stage-dives off a kitchen table
& hits linoleum belly-first. I’ll carry
my virginity into my 30s;
initially like a broken semi-truck
my teeth rope-drag uphill
&, later, like a bittersweet
keepsake I’ve grown to cherish,
because it’s mine. When I bet
my roommate a bottle of Crow
I’ll score a homerun by the end
of summer, he slaps my palm,
hazards me about Event Horizons,
how wrinkles in the cosmos’ fabric
unravel; he says I have time,
though he’s not sure how much.
