She broke

She broke my arm when I was a baby.It wasn’t my arm but call it an arm.It mended crooked, at an odd angle,thickened, clotted, stiff instead of supple,a wrinkled butterfly wing, an antelope limp.I could not swing a baseball bator brush a lover’s hair.I still have the broken arm.

My brother’s hurt was worse. He died of it.

She tattooed her scripture on my spine, hergospel proclamations on the inside of myskull, her dire psalms on the bottom of myright heel, on the sweep of my right hip,black etched lines, leaking, insinuating.

The tree grows out of mychest, another from myforearm, my jaw, myleft shin. Syrup tapped,dripped, fermented, sold,re-sold. A forest whereAbel kills, Noah drowns,the Messiah leper nevergets the ghost back.

Let me open the apartment door of herlimping mother in the kitchen, bakingbread, breaking bread, the afternoonsun jeweling soil and backyard dungand growing things and creeping thingsand the newborn and the dying and thedead. Her bread was sprinkled with flour.

Two candles under a throat to bless away.

My brother used a nickel-platedrevolver instead, a blessing ofthe endless white.

He was a wallof alternatinganger and pain.You try to live in that home.

He wanted to stomp-danceon the harridan nun’s grave.Now, with his somber bullet,his ashes are curb muck, roofdust, grit in the hop-skip girl’shair scattered in the wind.No dancing on his grave foranyone who hated him or loved.