Get It Out

 

The Friday night before I leave the country, my brother and friends are drunk out of their minds as I drive home in my mother’s 2015 Ford Expedition EL. I feel like a combat medic because we’ve reached the stage where everyone is comatose or near-comatose, groaning in the backseat, praying and pleading for the release of death, promising they’ll never drink again. When we pull into the driveway, I throw off my seat belt and whip open the doors. My brother staggers out of the car and vomits all over the black pavement, coating it in a film that almost glows beneath the garage door lights. When he’s finished, he wipes his lips. I feel a lot better now. The rest of my friends spill out of the car and follow suit. My brother walks over to the spigot by the house, dips his head under and rinses his mouth, then drags a hose behind himself. He sprays all the bile away into the mulch, beneath roses and irises lying dormant ahead of the spring. I have to hope when I come back, if I come back, they’ll have bloomed without me.

 

 

 

Autopsy

 

My father takes me

to the skinned corpse of the deer

he killed that afternoon,

faded flesh in the garage light.

 

I stare at the headless neck

peeking under the tarp.

He nudges me, points to the hole

where the arrow punched through.

 

When I was ten, I watched my father

slaughter a hen from my window.

He pressed one hand into her back,

held a hatchet in the other.

 

She spread her wings, as if to mate.

The first blow wasn’t clean.

He chopped again.

I heard the thud through the glass.

 

My father is used to blood.

Sometimes he shows me pictures

of his surgeries, brains glistening

under the glare of his headlamp.

 

Now, his headlamp glares

as we tow the corpse beneath

the treehouse he built for me

when I was young.

 

He hooks a gambrel through the legs

and hands me the rope,

but I’m not strong enough.

He hoists the corpse instead.

 

It slips, but I clutch the body close.

Sour sinew pierces my nose

as my father ties off the rope

and wipes the sweat from his brow.

 

He pats me on the shoulder

and walks back to the garage.

Under the treehouse, the body twirls,

creaking like an old tire swing.