Sisters sharing air and striped toothpaste.
Life at home: avoiding Mom,

as she razorblades her way down
the narrow hall, screaming in blue mania.

I gave you cookies and applesauce,
and you took them to your bedroom,

your habitual pity-pout telling me
to go and live on fricking Venus.

That choker’s too tight on your neck,
I said, and you drew your finger 

across your plump throat and gagged at me.
I went out and hid candy bars in the bushes.

I hoped I’d find dignity in hip plainclothes,
but it only got me sequestered at school.

I floundered in your stale wake there, 
hennaed my hair, looked perma-wounded:

lost, hopeful, scattered, disguised, flailing, 
naïve, hopeful, warm, hopeful, lovewishing. 

So, to review: Daddy and his “fancy farming,”
Mom with her spiked grief when he died.

You with your sullen mullet,
And me, ever the Pollyanna, always lookin’

for love and finally finding it, and hey—
Here’s what I really wanted to say:

I’ve never looked back, sister. 
                        

No family is true to life. 
Soppy mosses block the windows to reality,
while we taunt the babies with little shakes and pinches,
because they remind us of our own sprung buttons. 
Everyone in the house wants to scream, 
sordid years stacked up like fusty
attic blankets, and what’s never said is fairly infinite.

Any bright-looking thing is filled with fog, 
so the glare of sun on the snow is just bait;
let this be a warning to you. That deceptive snow:
Our feet stamp through it to get to someplace
less throttling, but the cold sticks with you 
and makes you wonder if those raucous times
with the old man on the floor were just dreams. 
No family is true to life. 

At the table, a block of seats have been set aside, 
where you will grow up and embittered, the same
meals on the same days of the week, until 
there comes a time when that distracting sound of 
modulated cursing draws you out of there and into new
associations. You actually start to think you have 
a chance at something—happiness?—but the
ringing of the shovel edge keeps pulling you back
to the hole they’ve been digging since before you were. 

There’s not much to say. No family is true to life. 
Their stories have been changed to protect the naïve,
and it’s no secret that by the time you figure it out, 
you’re so deep in the narrative that the only thing to do
is lean against a fence and watch it all play, coldly, out. 

One more time: No family is true to life.