I imagine my mother, at twenty five, a petite brunette with giant hazel eyes. I can picture her hanging upside down off the edge of her queen-sized bed, blood rushing to her head, the way she told me it did.

The police divers brought up the ATV.
Later our father restored it to its original condition.
The divers kept finding Jack’s things under the water.
They brought up his smile with its oversized tooth.

Gene could hear the phone ringing inside the trailer as he fumbled with the lock he kept meaning to fix. It was probably one of the stepmothers changing something. He wasn’t in the mood to talk to any of them. Let the machine take it.

We stole eggs from the refrigerator      
instead of the chicken coop—maybe      
we wanted to test if our parents will      
notice. They don’t.

Like fireflies, our faces

glow from the TV light

that night in June. We shoot Jack

until the burn dies,

bottle left with nothing

to claim.

I’m chasing after my older sister, Shelly – I’m the sheriff, she’s the gold thief – when all of a sudden she stops cold in her tracks and I can tell by the stiff, near vertical tilt of her body that something is wrong.

Ruba wandered into Michael’s bedroom. “I want to help,” she said, without knowing what her brothers had in mind.

They all three heard the baby cry from the kitchen down the hall.

“Ruba can be the librarian,” Fletcher said.

When they first fall, crabapples glow in the grass.

They fit in fists like rocks.

The first taste is sour at the curled edges

Of the tongue, but with time sweetness seeps up.

The town in which I grew up in didn’t have many stories of national importance associated with it. But it did have one. It was that of the five Sullivan brothers. Long before Tom Hanks starred in Saving Private Ryan (partially inspired by the Sullivan brothers), I knew the story of the guys from Iowa who were all killed in war. The entire family wiped out.

Begin with the original [Her hands bone-thin & paintbrush soft.Her hair horse-mane & heavy]                      What else is therefor you to know?   [She was a drape of curtain—dark, too close to black]      Later, you knew her as one knows

I think because I am the youngest child I was always most aware. I was to my brother, sister, father, and mother an unwanted confidante, soaking up the idiosyncratic irks they held against one another and others, attempting to empathize with most of their reasoning, like the proverbial overused sponge.

In 1986, in the salty darkness of the Westmoreland Mall cinema, I fell under the spell of Ferris Bueller’s devil-may-care bad boy, fake sick baby talking, “Twist and Shout” lip synching, excellent adventures in Chicagoland. Jeanie, his bitch-on-wheels (more on the wheels to follow) sister didn’t tug at my sympathies in the slightest.