The Watermill with the Great Red Roof (1665), Meindert Hobbema

Windbroke

You run 

with a rock in your mouth

because of a trouble with breathing

that used to panic you

shy as a boy

couldn’t look at faces

I know you

Philip, like a deadbolt

your father

with the tremor

roping the dog

big whooping cough 

spitting phlegm up

your mother 

on the phone

with the police again

fingers slicked

to the landline 

plastic swollen 

from heat

your sister

in the Walmart parking lot

then nowhere 

I know 

about Demarko 

stripping you

in the dockyard

the little phone camera

kids chanting swallow

you eleven

the cup of raw egg 

& vinegar

ladybugs 

you smothered

in a marker box

you fifteen

your father’s 

methadone

your twin bed

when we pushed

his truck up 

the farm road

when you told me

you couldn’t touch me

if my hair was wet

I carried 

a pink stone 

for a year in my bra 

thinking it

would convince something

while you trained

for the long sail

that you’d never finish

while you picked

some piece of gravel

to suck on

we pedaled

to the house where 

the swayback girl 

drowned

down on Cedar 

River Road

your fistful 

of rocks, one leg forward

little teasing 

grin, your cousin’s jeans 

too short on you

I know 

people call you

a halyard

windbroken

that something happened

when your team 

capsized

the sound knocked 

out of your

bodies hitting water

the swayback

girl’s mother 

on her porch

staring forward

the see-through top

I bought 

for twelve dollars

the hole 

in the window

how we rode away fast 

you wanted to go

far, said you’d never 

swam freshwater

a lake

manmade

packing my things 

while my parents slept

thinking it must matter

your hands

in my underwear

on my neck

the center

of my back

on your own chest

as a kid 

on a field gasping 

thinking you were dying

your father 

off the bleachers 

yelling breathe

like a deadbolt

from the farm road, downriver

in winter

when I loiter the harbor

with the soft lump

of cold quartz

pressed against

my left breast

when I walk 

around the house

& pretend to be you

in nothing 

but my stockings, gin

in a plastic cup

swaying

with one eye on the window

---

CHRISTINE BYRNE is currently an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she won the John Logan Poetry Prize. Her most recent work appears or is forthcoming in Best New Poets, New England Review, Plume, Poet Lore, The Journal, and elsewhere.

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