My brother lost his body
bit by bit—a foot, a finger, a shin.
The doctors strapped it to a bed,
and the mouth screamed on its behalf:
Help! Help! With the eyes,
my brother spied me, standing
in the body of someone
who looked like his sister;
and the mouth said
Health! Health! but my
body had no way of sharing.
Stubborn, he set his body
to starving: it’s a hard going.
One day I tricked it
into eating cake
by saying we were at a party.
The body likes to do what
everyone else is doing.
When he was done with it,
I could tell: every limb
he had left sighed, sank
and rose again softly, like smoke.
Like smoke: when he was done,
my brother had his body
set aflame. My body, always
dutiful, arranged it.
In the white room, roses, burning.
Then it was over. I took him home.
Jan Bottiglieri is a freelance writer in suburban Chicago and holds an MFA in poetry from Pacific University. She is an associate editor for the literary annual RHINO, and her poems have appeared in Court Green, Rattle, Margie, and elsewhere. Jan’s chapbook Where Gravity Pools the Sugar is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.
