brother as dog, mother as sky

briefly excerpting “Cut” by Catherine Lacey

i sit in corporate conferences and dream of the sky my brother was named under.

i remember him as a cold teenager.

at seven i scraped my knee, bloodied and tender under a cloudy sky;
he didn’t know what to do with bewildered body language;
it was clear to me then that he knew from an early age only the life of a fighting dog.

in the shadow of that scar, and silence after the fall, i grew up bloodied and tender.

by firelight, by flame, by silence, softness, i fanned the rapturous dreams of a young boy—

boyish-brackish-bloodline traced through my mother’s missing 家譜

the world turned a sprawling, melancholic, dreamlike america under the sky of a cold brother’s memory

expansive midwestern streets no family roadtrip has ever been

lights up on the sign: rural king guns

someone whispering there will always be an angry man in your house—

light bugs swirling in the dark canopy of night; i remember nights huddled under thin cotton sheets to the backdrop of an angry boy and the rattling of his homemade cage

thumb prints in the walls and holes in the roof; a teenage boy’s tongue can be canine; so close to the bullish belligerence of my mother’s grown son; inching like a dying dog toward the safety of falling water; his teeth, imprinted in all the pillow backs and la-z-boys of a perennial living room

baby,

the cage is opening

i have always felt my life was punctuated by precipitation. maybe it was always just water falling through leaky hole punched roofs.

baby,

the door is opening

barbed heart pierced lips tattooed fingertips catching raindrops, contort upward to see patches of blue; latching onto the manifest destiny of a mother who dreamed, herself, under financier roofs, holy skylines that caged her heart and caged her boy

she dreamed, as i dream

of child, firelight, sky

Jasmine Chen is a writer from Long Island, New York. She currently resides in New York City, where she is studying Anthropology, American Studies, and English. She has a perennial love of the color green, apple juice, and math rock. Find more of her words and work on Instagram @xjasminechenx or TikTok @longingforlanguage.