She broke
By Patrick T. Reardon
She broke my arm when I was a baby.
It wasn’t my arm but call it an arm.
It mended crooked, at an odd angle,
thickened, clotted, stiff instead of supple,
a wrinkled butterfly wing, an antelope limp.
I could not swing a baseball bat
or brush a lover’s hair.
I still have the broken arm.
My brother’s hurt was worse. He died of it.
She tattooed her scripture on my spine, her
gospel proclamations on the inside of my
skull, her dire psalms on the bottom of my
right heel, on the sweep of my right hip,
black etched lines, leaking, insinuating.
The tree grows out of my
chest, another from my
forearm, my jaw, my
left shin. Syrup tapped,
dripped, fermented, sold,
re-sold. A forest where
Abel kills, Noah drowns,
the Messiah leper never
gets the ghost back.
Let me open the apartment door of her
limping mother in the kitchen, baking
bread, breaking bread, the afternoon
sun jeweling soil and backyard dung
and growing things and creeping things
and the newborn and the dying and the
dead. Her bread was sprinkled with flour.
Two candles under a throat to bless away.
My brother used a nickel-plated
revolver instead, a blessing of
the endless white.
He was a wall
of alternating
anger and pain.
You try to live in that home.
He wanted to stomp-dance
on the harridan nun’s grave.
Now, with his somber bullet,
his ashes are curb muck, roof
dust, grit in the hop-skip girl’s
hair scattered in the wind.
No dancing on his grave for
anyone who hated him or loved.
Patrick T. Reardon
5.15.19
This poem originally appeared in the April, 2019 issue of Esthetic Apostle.
Written by : Patrick T. Reardon
For more than three decades Patrick T. Reardon was an urban affairs writer, a feature writer, a columnist, and an editor for the Chicago Tribune. In 2000 he was one of a team of 50 staff members who won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Now a freelance writer and poet, he has contributed chapters to several books and is the author of Faith Stripped to Its Essence. His website is https://patricktreardon.com/.