Greyed Rainbow (1953), Jackson Pollock
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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