Holy Nights
Jomil Ebro
Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest 2025 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Tom Howard, Poetry
In Los Angeles summers, you're reverent for relief, so you stay up. In my bedroom—I am twelve, sister seven—we build altars of Ninja Turtles, pogs, and Mouse-Trap while dewdrops of white jasmine and monoxide anoint our foreheads. Sis's bed is a blanket on the floor with gold forest stitching. At midnight, we snack on Honeycomb and sunset-layered Big Stick popsicles with jokes on the stick: Whaddya call shoes made of banana-peels? Slippers! We watch hours of The Twilight Zone. I spook my sister, and she clutches her dingy pink hippo—sits up straight. We low-karaoke Boyz-II-Men, talk into the cricket-choired night—about mom and dad's fights (Man, that pan is now chipped), "Thelma and Louise" (Did they live?), our neighbor who hurls rocks and calls us dog-eaters, whether we'll get new school clothes. At my yard-sale desk, I teach her to draw the human face. Patience, butthead. She erases too vigorously, tears the paper, cries. We fall asleep, small rock on bigger rock. The sunrise palms my face—forgot to draw the curtains. When I get up to close them, I behold my sister, knee lifted, making the number 4, snoring ever so. I fold excess blanket over her, quesadilla-like. She's fox-small: the gold forests twirl like asterisks of innocence. How could she know that her apricot cheeks will fail to redden dad's knuckles, the too-late divorce, the cervical cancer—You can't have kids—mom despising her good uneducated husband, her depression hovering like Bay Bridge fog, her once-strong brother who'll unthwack like a fish in the intimate mouth of a shouting pelican? The maroon curtains slightly curve in the middle, letting silent blades of light slip in—those slippers—nicking holes in our world, tender and mild, and my sister and I sleep, sleep in heavenly peace.
