Let's forget we're brothers

Let's forget we're brothers
counting in the night
your morning mouth a
black apple burning.

Let's forget we're brothers
boxing at my wedding
women dust their yellow dance
on a gleaming new boat.

Let's forget we're brothers
and sing your tales of
ale and rust,
before the dark cape
sends the sky against us
with its chalkboard suns
and its suicidal shrimp

Let's forget to ask
who dialed away those
concrete doorstep Sundays,
you took my hand on
hammocked dreams
through the bragging trees,

left me reclining

in the corners of your eyes.

"TRENTON MAKES, THE WORLD TAKES"

I am in a picture book
biting off the corners
yes, they taste like pulp

I was planted here by arrow-mothers
where the firm street deadens at the factory wall
they spoke to me
as if I were a learning game

I made a cardboard computer
and chickened out at show-and-tell
whispering mace a menace
while Ms. Dolan drank her Kool-Aid

Sometimes I feel like Trenton
but today I am on my way
green forest back
in a picture book with otters

Sisters

Laura's armor
falls
broils and cuts

Claire's ear
sells donuts in
special
crab oils

Nell's pets'
beaks
deal baubles that
wrench:

Ten beeps then mute.

Julie's tremors
smell
dots with rust

spots blear
glassed then
unlike
tinfoil

Nell gets
weeks
in her own
stench:

"Dial ten," says flute.