3 Untitled American Sonnets

God came down from heaven & told me my life’s purpose
is to collect abandoned shopping carts. God told me
to make herbal tea. God told me to crouch & save
the web-stuck moth while on the phone my brother’s
brother read me a poem about Ivan Karamazov.
God told me to tend the tomatoes, to misquote scripture,
to cry. God snapped his fingers & behold, out limped
a pale, riderless horse. God spat & rained out
our soccer game. God said, Let there be hangnails
& mosquito bites, let there be brutality, let there be blood.
God told my suicide bereavement group
not to look me in the eye. God told my brother
what he told Berman, what he told Cobain, what he told me:
Listen, child: there is a place where I won’t hurt you anymore.

My brother is following me down the Avenues, through
the graveyard, up Q Street, speech impeded, three years old.
He gestures & burbles: water. Taps his elbow: binky. He speaks &
I convey, making him known to the world. Now my brother
is chasing me through fern woods, airsoft gun in-hand, laughing
hysterical, brown eyes glistening. He is gelling his hair like mine,
trying on my Vans, slipping off my skateboard. He is pretending
to read the fine print on his Pokémon cards, proudly waving
his Gengar like a flag. My brother is writing sonnets in
his underwear, lighting a Camel backwards, burning his coffee black.
In houses and down alleys long-since gutted dark,
my brother slams a ping-pong ball, blesses the sacrament,
plucks a classical guitar. My brother’s holy ghost watches as I
fall to my knees in the basil, mumbling, Haunt me, haunt me, please.

Pull the bullet from the rocks outside the Highlander
& slide it back into its casing. Douse the propellant,
let the hammer rest. Gingerly re-stack the shards,
one by one, into a sheet of window clear
as air atop the temple spires. Reapply the tint.
Send these DMs homeward like pigeons roosting—
all these beloveds asking without asking whether
I’m cracking the bottle, fingering the blade.
I’m not; I am crying in the garden, staring down
my shaky hands, drowning my poor heirlooms
in rivers of tap. As evening plummets, I’m wiping snot &
reassuring kindly neighbors: no I’m not hungry,
yes I am bereft, no the world will never again
know the sparkle of his laughter. They bring fried Spam.