I wear my brother’s grief

with the story of 

my past: the character 

in a hospital

gown spinning around

pretending to flip

pancakes, being told:

“You will not remember 

this.”— People still

claim: “He does not

remember much,” but

no space held there

for me to reply, no 

air to fly, ground to 

land or stand and I 

want to dance it off, 

this resting in the valley

of post-surgery memory—

forever a distance

cut between me and

the world—in me,

the disease cut out, 

drowned into nothing,

but where does nothing go

in the body and what

does it look like?

It looks like a young boy

on the playground not 

being picked but picked on,

nothing in the shape of 

a head without hair, 

varicose veins, saran wrap

over a broviac, until 

the boy’s older brother

makes it something, 

standing up and stepping in

and the bully backs away, 

vanishes, because these 

are things I do not remember,

it’s just the story of grief

I wear when I hear 

my brother has cancer.