Desperately, Hoping
A year ago, I found your art,
stumbled over it like a stray bottle in the dark.
It rolled across the floor,
spilled something heavy into me.
Three kids love me—
clinging vines on a crumbling trellis.
Their laughter pricks my ears
like the static of a busted radio.
My wife loves me too.
She plants herself beside me,
roots deep, unyielding,
even as my soil turns sour.
Sixteen, my brother—
a tree stripped by lightning,
split and smoldering.
I’ve hated my hands ever since.
Art makes me lighter—
for an hour, I’m a balloon,
colorful and drifting,
until the world yanks the string.
Autism, they call it.
I call it the taste of too much sound,
the itch of every word said wrong,
the guilt of doors closed too hard.
When my kids hug me,
I feel their arms turn to barbed wire.
I flinch. They let go.
Their faces wilt, petals falling.
When she doesn’t answer,
silence swells like floodwater.
I try to dam it with my hands—
those hands—
but it spills, drowns, crumbles.
My friends—
they call me ghost
when I’m right there.
I watch myself,
spectral, shuffling between them.
I did the math.
A sum of zeros.
A family better off
without its dead weight.
I’m desperately
hoping you’re
a four-leaf clover.