We love our bodies for their factory qualities,
their two different kinds of beauty: alone
and beside someone.
We love how they texture the dark. If we don’t move
for a very long time, we begin to wonder
from where we are disappearing.
On the day my brother inherits me,
there is a double rainbow, which is maybe God’s
way of saying I know yesterday
your brother had his first seizure in six months
because I know everything.
Maybe it’s His way of gift wrapping
some double parenthetical
in the never-ending explanation of love.
Between me and my brother
there is a door. He is on one side
playing Shostakovich. I am on the other,
waiting for a pause
the size of my body I can step through.
When was it even raining?
What are the rules? I shake
his many expensive pills
in their many cheap brown bottles.
I shake the empties to make sure
there are still that many kinds of nothing.
What comes after an archipelago.
What we call silence,
even though it’s really just less sound.
My breath cooling as it passes
along the wet of my throat. A note
held so long it begins to fray.
What we don’t say when beauty is too obvious.
