Another Creature: Poems

My Brother Calls Me from His Boat

My Brother Calls Me from His Boat Ship to shore: behind his faint voice the buck and rock of lake waves slapping fiberglass, sultry August night. On his new girlfriend’s cell. She’s a dental hygiene student named Dupree, twenty years younger, flossing him for practice. I got the cleanest white smile these days, my brother says, in the lilt that betrays his tipsiness, forecasts the first almost-innocent snippet of cruelty one hair’s breadth over the rim of charm. My brother sets up his camp on that rim, dances its giddy width in steel-toed boots while the rest of us watch spellbound, afraid he’ll fall again, afraid he won’t. When we were children, my brother and I learned to ski across the glittering lakes of upper Michigan. The uncles took turns on the boat between beers while our steely fins cut through the water lilies. Meanwhile the dozen sentry aunts on shore cupped hands over eyes and squinted as they marked us, shrieked when our lifejackets came untied, hooted when we dropped a ski. Here’s where you’d want to know if my brother skied barefoot or blew up frogs. Here’s about when he should start to tip wrong: the touch of a wayward priest or a call to the napalm jungle, tattoo curse of a bayoneted heart. But my brother ate hot dogs and peed in the woods like the rest of us kids in wet bathing suits, a boy merely beloved, called inside 45 for pie and ice cream, the flag of his Mickey Mouse beach towel waving dry in pine-drenched breeze. And now my brother calls me from his boat, shitfaced to shore, and he sounds so lonely you might forgive the smashed cars, the threats that sent boyfriends sprinting, the dozens of powder blue rosaries said for nothing. Why don’t you swim over, he says, and have a drink. That is . . . if you’re not too good for us . . . college girl. When I close my eyes: the light smacking sound of lake and the rainbowed gasoline, circling my brother’s boat. 46 ...