Brendan Todt

We assured our son before our other son was born that love was something you could never run out of and never spend up. The way we tell him, though we know it’s not true, that the sun will never burn off or give up. He’s not yet old enough to be learning that the universe itself is expanding, nor to ask expanding into what? He hasn’t yet read that the sun is moving just as fast and blindly as the rest of us. It will be years before he and his friends giggle under the dimmed lights at the spermatogenesis cartoons. But he knows Mrs. Dayton’s stomach keeps getting bigger and bigger and that one day it will stop. And out will come baby. And baby will be loved, the way he is loved, and the way he loves Mrs. Dayton and his mother and me. But I wonder if he wonders anymore about the little brother who wasn’t.  And what we’ve done with the love we said we’d be spending on him, but haven’t. 



Brendan Todt lives and teaches in Sioux City, Iowa. His poetry and short fiction can be found in print and online. Most recently, his work has been featured in Pithead Chapel and The Ekphrastic Review, where his poem “Because the Living May Be Worth Something, Too” was selected as a “Best of the Net” nominee.