Poetry: Brother by Steven Sanchez
Steven Sanchez’s new work pleads with love—for preservation, for family. “Brother” plays a melancholy song, mudcracked and wilting, but not one without hope, or without beauty. The poem seeks the place inside us where the cool water of sibling love finally pools.
Brother
Like water, you poured
Lunesta in your cupped hand
and drained our mother’s bottle
empty. Often, I know thirst
is an afterthought, the body
mudcracked long before
the tongue dries
and buds its first cacti.
You reached inside your throat
and plucked a desert bloom,
plucked again and again
until your body expelled
a bouquet. Left behind,
a single clipping can sprout
and grow a shadow
where it’s so appealing to sit
and call it rest. I have
planted seeds in your chest,
tilled the soil with my own
two fists—hated you, like myself.
Is it a phase?
No, he’s a faggot.
Mom and dad whispered
about me. They whispered
about you, too. Mom says
to prolong a flower’s life,
cut the stems,
fill the vase with aspirin
water—before it wilts,
hang it upside down
and douse it
in hairspray.
For years, I’ve kept
mine this way: brittle
and delicate.
They say
flowers thrive when you talk
to them, when you sing
lullabies. Please, Jacob, hear me
when I say I love you.
Steven Sanchez
Steven Sanchez is the author of Phantom Tongue (Sundress Publications, 2018), selected for the Rochelle Ratner Memorial Award by Mark Doty. He is a CantoMundo Fellow, Lambda Literary Fellow, and the inaugural winner of the Federico García Lorca Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared in Agni, American Poetry Review, Missouri Review, and elsewhere.
