There Are No Perfect Synonyms for Brother

We have never seen each other’s blood. They found opiates in his, antibodies in mine. We break against the past in different ways. I locked myself in someone’s college and drank. I invited myself to dorm rooms. The boys came. He broke into a house to smoke. He’s looking for a cheap gun with our mother’s phone. I calculate the number of lies it would take to puncture the state line, bring him here. I map the highway arteries strung between us. Clots of red clay and Mississippi pine. Squadrons full of wide-jawed men in Money. My brother’s premature heart, a few beats slower per minute than everyone else’s. His chest a rusted cotton gin, churning withdrawal. When I say: I have lived in his father’s house, I mean every rest stop; every dead boy’s memorial plaque riddled with holes; every drunken man stumbling toward my mother’s back as she sits alone on the bed’s trembling lip, hands tied in matrimony; every danger that darkens the threshold of my faith, finds me on my knees and shoves illnesses down my throat like my own genitals. There are too many ways to be invincible. Between my brother and me, my sister misunderstands. She tugs at her stethoscope. We can’t attach a number to this pain, though the tens look like men fallen to the ground, collarbones separating from noosed heads. Necks swollen shut. When the cops came, my mother tried to punch through the cruiser’s window—not to save her son, but to strike him. I tell her: I don’t know what else to say. When we succumb to the lymphocytic current, wrapped in the tarp of ordinary bodies and brine, no one cares who first lifted a thigh to the needle’s singular gaze, or who was thrown screamless into the purling water. Our fathers’ hands are gone. My mother’s hands are shaking. It’s not her fault she can’t unopen the vein.