—I’M BREATHING BUT I’M WHEEZING, FEEL LIKE I’M EMPHYSEM-ING

Yesterday

I reach the inside of your throat by Komodo dragon, saddle-sore and fatigued, a sojourn of will at last accomplished.

Up close, your throat resembles a cylindrical cave, all this up-and-down-hollow, as I cling to its edges, digging my bootheels into the gummy lining.

At night, I string a lantern from your tonsil bell and watch it splay shadows in line with the measured thrum of your breathing. Later I hear you snore. Later I hear you yawn and gargle while a waterfall of foamy mint douses me.

On the phone you tell your sister everything. His occupation and shoe size. The way you’ve come to love the smell of axel grease. I only hear my name once, followed by, he’s not half the man he used to be.

—SOME WONDER HOW I’M DOING, BUT MOST DON’T EVEN ASK

                                                Panettone

My eyes are on parole while Sis stabs hers on repeat, attempting genocide in the backseat as Mom is driving up front.

It’s a blunder, this youth of ours, a fiddlehead of confusion.

Mother wants the Milan bread for Christmas, the kind with the name that rhymes with bologna. She gets visions that way. She’s anaphylactic and aloof, cigarette smoke wafting out of her ear drums.

Yesterday Dad shot Pepper for frothing too much. He was a good dog, but he had weak stilts like us, the type that snap when you get too timid.

It’s a burden being twins because all of our visions are shared, like conjoined ghosts haunting different houses. Still I love my Sis. She alone is love in this world.

Our days pool and dry. We stopped fourth grade because Mom said our teacher had a fur tongue, but when I saw him kissing her it looked like any other tongue to me. Fleshy, a fish without skin or scales.

Up front, the medium saints bobble, hanging off the rearview like a couple of recalcitrant suicides. I elbow Sis to look, to have something that centers us, but she’s a ragdoll made of spongy wool. If mother turns around we’re dead, but even if she doesn’t, we might be.

Sis thinks we’ll never make it, thinks life is too expensive and meant to be shortened or shredded. Her constant anguish is a blade at the back of my throat day and night.

I take Sis’s hand but she fights me, always an eddy unspooling. Still, I grasp her fingers in mine as if they’re a prayer that’s not sure what it’s asking. I make her meet my eyes and, through the ether, I tell her everything I know about beauty and hope. Without speaking, I say. Let’s go. This way. Together.