by JILLIAN OLIVER

It’s better to let the past lie clean and cold,
yet memories swallow us up,
like my older brother’s clothes on me.

I remember his set of Civil War encyclopedias
framing his bed, tombstone-gray.
Hamlet, Goosebumps, and Britannica signaled
a bright boy of twelve who was well read.

Blood now peppers the wall above his bed, caked and oxidized,
while we’ve forgotten that at one time
his mind was more than just a piece of paper
that had folded in on itself too many times.

Before the voices took hold
and doctors took charge to tease apart the folds,
I was invited inside,
as if he wanted to walk the creases of his origami.
On one such night, we tossed glow-in-the-dark stars
on his carpet at dusk
then we leapt from the bed into space, again and again
to recapture the split second of levitation.

Then hesitation. His blue eyes drifted down.
Lips muttered something quiet yet exasperated.
I stood helpless outside his paper walls
almost hearing them crinkle
and seeing them bend closed
meekly like a flower after the sun’s gone down.
His left eye twitched, with its lopsided iris,
soon to become a symbol of his distorted mind.

Have we forgotten that his babysitter once said
he could be a professor? Does it even matter?
we see him now crouched on a street corner
beastly like a bugbear, upper incisors gone,
canines bold and sharp.

Prepare, his teacher had said, for his academic future.
Words that might as well have fallen in a storm drain.
He now holds out a meth-shaken hand for change.
And by necessity, we’ve forgotten
that this wasn’t his choice.

The encyclopedias were donated.
His aged books were long gone.
And like a censor with her tool of erasure,
I scrub with a blind sense of duty
the last flecks of blood from the wall.

Ω

Jillian Oliver is a writer from New Orleans. When she’s not working at the public library, she’s dabbling in poetry, essay writing, and watercoloring. Her work has appeared in The Dunes Review, Gargoyle Magazine, and the Quell Bell Magazine.

Sophie Avery is an undergraduate student at Smith College who dabbles in film photography.