Wall of Blood
I try to imagine that final night. You were at Middlebury, and the payphone on your dorm floor rang. How you dropped the receiver. I see it swinging on its chain.
I still don’t know the details of how you got there. I don’t think you had a car, but I know
you were the one to find her, her brains spattered like a Jackson Pollock.
Middlebury to Westport is a long drive. Her brain had already left
this planet. We can’t always make it to the hospital in time.
It’s impossible to gauge what it was like when your mother believed the CIA would take
you. No, not believed— experienced in her eye-burned visions. Medications prescribed
but left
in the trash. Maybe the CIA was behind that, too?
And our father abandoned you to this madness.
Kathy, childhood bedroom as total darkness. Your mother barricaded you both in.
You were my half-sister, but also my earth’s core.
My favorite playmate.
The parent neither of us ever had.
I remember you got melanoma soon after. Your model gigs terminated by the wide
circle on your leg, ghostly white, no sun in your future.
At 48, the crab entered your brain and your lungs and you were gone in 8 short months.
I wonder if this, too, came from those nights shut up in that dark room. If the crab
ignited as you stared at that wall of blood.
Devotions
Approach
the altar and smell
the bougainvillea,
the pines, freshly-sliced
Mandarin orange.
Place the offering:
this empty page, containing
my breath.
I beg on my knees
for fortitude against
usual pain fingers
dipped into space
between patella and
meniscus. Between lungs
and stomach— peeled
back like the Mandarin,
laid bare.
Page contains
what?
Memories of shadow
ghosts: father, sister, mother.
Friends and acquaintances.
All children perishing
of war or famine.
These phantoms
not mine to recall
only to mourn.
I pick up an english muffin
laden with butter.
Bite
into pure sensation.
This, too, a form
of worship.
How do words
formulate?
Mine always
slink into
memory where
I can’t
look away.
Jennifer Shikes Haines (she/her) is a disabled poet and retired educator based in Southeast Michigan. She enjoys exploring questions of what does, and doesn’t, connect our world. She has poems published or forthcoming in Epiphany, Corporeal, The Patterson Literary Review, Tension Literary, JAKE and HNDL Mag: Highlighted Neurodivergent & Disabled Life, among others, and has been nominated for Best of the Net. She can be found on IG @jenshaines77.
The Marbled Sigh 