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.


Tom Kelly‘s (Instagram: @tomkellyyyyy) poetry and fiction appear in RedividerThe PinchAmerican Literary Review, Hobart and other journals. He lives in Tallahassee, FL and his favorite dessert is a tie between a BJ’s Pizookie and Jeni’s Birthday Cake Ice Cream.

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