Bart Edelman

My Brother, Broken
 
I want to ask my brother,
Why he is so broken;
Why he has no more sky in him,
Just ground to swallow
What’s left of his days.
 
My sister-in-law tells me
I shouldn’t pry, again.
Let him be as he is.
There’s nothing left to figure out.
He went off the deep end,
Then withdrew, simple as that,
Before she cuts our phone call short.
 
Three thousand crooked miles
Now stretch between the boy
I shared a bedroom with and me.
Maybe childhood wasn’t so trouble-free.
Perhaps, what I perceived as normal
Turned sinister, and I’m clueless.
 
Each night, in the dark of sleep,
I take yet another step
On the road home to my brother.
But I’m not wearing proper shoes,
And the laces come easily undone,
As if they’re willing to explain.
 
 

Bart Edelman’s poetry collections include Crossing the Hackensack, Under Damaris’ Dress, The Alphabet of Love, The Gentle Man, The Last Mojito, The Geographer’s Wife, Whistling to Trick the Wind, and This Body Is Never at Rest: New and Selected Poems 1993 – 2023, forthcoming from Meadowlark Press. He has taught at Glendale College, where he edited Eclipse, a literary journal, and, most recently, in the MFA program at Antioch University, Los Angeles. His work has been widely anthologized in textbooks published by City Lights Books, Etruscan Press, Fountainhead Press, Harcourt Brace, Longman, McGraw-Hill, Prentice Hall, Simon & Schuster, Thomson/Heinle, the University of Iowa Press, Wadsworth, and others. He lives in Pasadena, California.