I. in wait of those who take you away
his head like a hen a fox got to. an eggshell
split into a flume of inner runoff redding
onto snowfall stacked grayish, mouthful of
spillover down his cheekbones the color
of feldspar. the wind a jaywalker whistling
through his coat. i kneel as in bonedust beside
him, my brother. on his backside he wears
his skull put on rime, head wound sealed by
hard-packed drifts; and in this way, he is held.
my brother in our yard looking almost alive.
II. when unseeing here the eyes belong
stilled as time I stay my look elsewhere. away
from this stump flecked with the stars of him,
these brothered insides far from any ski rope
or sled or quad exhaust spuming an idled rest.
to, instead: faraway gas flares across our river
above an icebreaker, ice floe splittings large.
closer still a blackbird lights on the topmost
branch of a shortleaf pine. what is God to us,
maybe. and I remember him. though a stranger
in our yard tonight I tell my brother God
will not be the one who lets him die.
III. were there talk between us hear its sound
incise our tongues. vocabularies no odder or
stranger than what stutters out of us already.
offhand thoughtlets at the ready to leak out
that head wound of yours. let them come.
question
should I turn you over should I lift
carry you to bleed down my spine
what do you think what to do any
thing to do to make you die less
leave me as I lie. comfort too hard to come by.
talk like
brother okay but forgive these darkest
parts of ourselves I meant to watch
I did I botched the warning part didn’t
I I the sorriest of suckers the worst of
say less. no apology. how bad are we talking?
brothers
as such in honesty not great lookswise
I mean your canines stuck in them are
a kind of brownish bubblings a sort of
retching foam and your head your head
sidestep this. undo my thirst. carry me inwards.
towards
a housed mother and father. my brother
with me as if back in from play. blood
snow mud tracked all through the house.
child held in a fist. mother unmother me.
IV. fathered radio waves meanwhile birdcalls
father with backchannel talk, hurry-up callouts
to drunk roughnecks on backroads used
to black ice. any quicker to show than what reds
and blues might come otherwise. mensch
after mensch on the horn asked to steer breakneck
down potholed asphalt, jackknife a trailer,
ram headfirst a salt truck. meantime our mother
in a nightdress stands in all the porch light
yellows. mother whose lungs part the frozen air,
howl whose cry meets that of a freighter’s
horn. stilled at the sight of her son broken under
snowfall. her braveling. her world light.
V. day in which death buries a dream
serried mourners shades faces mostly bone
they wear their shadows like a cape
they stand on ground thawed with torches
for the putting-in of their most recent dead
boy whose head’s divide outpoured light
boy whose body pallbearers hold safekept
they never even dressed him up they even
left the eyelets to his snow boots open
all day to bury one body so dark when
a blackbird eats from the fresh-turned dirt
and the traveling musician’s song comes up
and the last of this daylight falls down
VI. uncertain arrival of men who take
father in driveway whose breath breathes
cold smoke back into mine. father whose
answered call rattles a flatbed down our
gravel lane, two drunks soon out of it
with a fishhook tied with monofilament
line. men who tell us not to worry when
they suture the moon. wound. learn to
trust your mistakes, another brother
will later say. let them suture the moon.
they roll him, my brother some sudden
washout, spray of blood, saliva dribble.
what is it those eyes of my brother’s say?
watercolors behind eyelids filmy as mud
at the riverbottom. inside their lostness
of grays and browns a light there still
as the gas flares that burn behind them.
J.M. Braun’s work has appeared and is forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Fiction International, Puerto del Sol, DIAGRAM, filling Station, Bayou Magazine, and elsewhere. Braun is a 2024 graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where they won the John Logan Poetry Prize.
The art that appears alongside this piece is “Pietà, Revisited” by JONATHAN KENT ADAMS.