When My Sister Places a Jellyfish on My Head
BY AMANDA DETTMANN
& yells, Make a wish! I think of my parents’ waterbed, un-
making love—how I’ve never caught you, Mom & Dad,
down the hall, a few froggy doors from mine, baking
bread in each other’s burning church, unafraid to click
cicadas between tombstones of teeth & let your daughters
hear you. Hooves on headboard? Impossible. Snow angels
in sock drawer? Possible. I do not blame you for your quiet,
your modest tsunami knees, water running through a gun
handed down to me. As you tucked your groins into a little girl
on my father’s birthday, did you resurrect the neighbors to lust me,
to love me in the middle of your parents’ dying phone call?
I picture the night you finally howled communion over covers,
breaking bones like bangles, bouquets of climaxed toes peeling back
my winking green. Your lupine & lilac bedspread a chariot blown
off sown tracks. Mattress of healing, like El Santuario de Chimayo,
discarded canes & braces kissing white carpet, dirt-packed wheelchairs hanging
on hooks like Peter Pan’s shadow. You named me Gift of God worthy of love.
Am I. In love? Hatable? You scooped hospital scent into each other’s vials
to take home, after surviving the 1997 Michigan ice storm, after suctioning
my head when born, after I was too big to be alive, to be unwound,
to wound. If I die before you, I’ll know you heard me above
(at least once) in the guest bedroom with my ex, poem legs spread
like god’s blood on his lover’s clotted sheet. When you spoon
off the morning-after bathroom mirror & say, We will never speak of this again…
I nod but don’t believe you. My teacher asks me what I want to be
when I grow up. I draw a jellyfish that blushes each shush, her mouth mid-sting.
