The Road West
Jed Myers
Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest 2016 (view all the winners)
Honorable Mention, Tom Howard, Poetry
I left my kid brother standing
alone in our mother's living room
display of antiquities. I left him
flanked by the dual stone poodles
guarding the hearth. He held still for it,
his two lips one line like a mute
hyphen between state secrets, in his eyes
the fog where he'd lose me—to one side
the stuffed great white chair Dad slept in
till he died, to the other the chartreuse
and burgundy flag stripes of the loveseat
where no one sat but the funeral guests.
I left my brother there to be the one
satellite orbiting the gold crown
Dr. Goldman set in Mom's mouth
back in that molten epoch when she hacked
smoke into the oatmeal she cooked us
for breakfast. I left my brother
hung with our father's worsted jackets
and camel-hair coats—left him to wear
the bequeathed tassel loafers I wouldn't
even if my feet were not too short.
No, I left him before all that, as I slipped
off in the mud of the creek to hunt newts
in that stretch of tall maples and mountain ash
between the cemetery and the abandoned
tracks—no, earlier still,
back when Mom whispered This one's mine
to herself as my brother was handed
fresh-toweled-off from the blood-wet of birth
into her arms, while Dad the courier
passed me on to his mother's domain
in the flickering shade of sycamores. Yes I left
my brother before he ever came home
and was locked behind his bedroom door
to keep him safe from fratricide. Such
were the divisions of the dark reign
inside our mother's heart, where I left him
in charge. And one of us had to
go out and love the world, take the road
west, cross the known's edge, and trust
it isn't all war zone, this flesh.
