My Brother Used To Restart His Watch By Holding It Close To His Chest

[Hi! I thought I’d share a new poem. I hope that’s ok with you.]

In a corner-cutting effort, he carried the sofa
and television outside to the backyard,
drew the extension cord from the garage,
and played video games all summer. Outdoors.

When he was 15, he snuck into an R-rated
movie and said that he saw at least 27 boobs.
That didn’t seem right. Maybe he blinked.

Back home I have pictures of clouds hanging
above my bed, tacked to the wall in only one
spot so they bend and curl naturally with the light.
On good days, the pictures unfold. On bad days,
they’re closed, defended, and the pathetic irony
of the rain is just enough to make me want
to write about it.

Last year for Lent he gave up sweets and on
Easter morning he bought two full-sheet cakes
and avoided diabetes by THIS MUCH.
I remember him looking up, frosting in his nostrils,
a big, unrelenting grin of a 40-day sugar abstinence
on his face.

That night he was hugging his knees and in between
hiccups he told me about a girl, how she would
visit him in his studio—
that “weird, unfolding understanding,” he said—
the impossibly long phone conversations,
the letters, pages and pages and pages of them.

The best stories are about people falling for
each other on paper, as if love isn’t anything
more than an abstract bureaucracy. 

Today I am watching television, the same one
that spent the summer in the backyard. I flip to
the weather station. Storm systems are curling
up the coast, reporters in gore-tex are hanging
on to stop signs and describing gale force winds.

I never knew her and never needed to.