I have this memory
of going to my brother's house
and picking up an old grenade he got from
god-knows where.
it's missing the pin
and when you hold it, it feels heavier than it has a right to

My brother has a talent for scaring people
I've been the main test subject since i arrived on this planet
we went through our preteen years with him obsessive over marilyn manson
and telling me he was going to kill me while I'm sleeping.

and he has no idea that I have nightmares about him now.

In my memory, I fold my hands around the dead grenade
saying "What if this just went off one day?"
He laughed the way
he does when he's thinking something terrible
and gave me one of his sinister looks.

Growing up with him, I'm used to dark serious expressions
and his ability to detatch from anything that resembles fear
I'm used to his gift for scaring people
so much that sometimes I find it as entertaining as he does.
but sometimes I just go blank

he pulls the grenade from my hand and bends his knees untill we're the same height
holds it close enough to my face that I can smell the dust along traces of something else
He stares me right in the eye with the grenade between us
and says

"Boom."

Laughs.

In one of my nightmares
I relive this memory over and over.
over and over untill I hit a tripwire in my sleep
the memory ends and starts again
only the grenade explodes and the world falls to pieces
as soon as his lips form around the B in BOOM.
and his facial expression never changes.

I wake up with the smell of sulpher
and burnt skin

I always want to give my brother a call when this happens.
untill I remember we're not talking.
Not talking, because nobody in our family
wants to look back on the way we grew up

My brothers and I grew up in the same house
with the same father we never saw,
the same mother we did see,
treated us all differently
the mother we saw shooting up when she thought
that the bedroom door was locked.
We grew up together
but lived in different worlds
and different realities

Different styles of abuse
Neglect, torture, and for Archie
a lack of rules and consequences.
But it doesnt matter how we got here
it matters that at some point growing up
we got lost in cover-up lies
expanded our alibis
to hide ourselves from eachother
instead of just the outside world.
We dont want to remember playing cops and robbers
when we were little
because then we remember my mother telling Archie to play with friends his own age
instead of his deliquent younger siblings.
we remember my mother threatening to break all of Robbie's toy guns
if he didnt dissapear from her sight
and we remember the nights
where one of them would sneak an ice pack into my bedroom

dormant bombs lying in the backs of our minds
waiting for us to decide
if there will ever be a right time
to stop letting sleeping bombs lie

we've tried
to get along as adults
home grown products of dysfunction
and Archie talks about his kids
and Robbie talks about his underground death metal
and I talk about poetry untill they ask to see it.

Now that's been lost
to my explosions of the truth no one wants to look at
Archie's anger and fear that he'll be found out
for the secret hell we keep

Lost to bombs going off in my sleep
like Robbie's disgust that I cant let it go
cant just forget and leave it alone.

See, my brother's got this grenade without a pin
like a metaphor for the history under our skin
disguising itself as something too old to explode
lying dead in our hands, still and cold

Cause I've got this dream
I'd like to replace my nightmares with, where

I pick up the grenade
look my brother straight in the eye and say
"What if this bomb just went off one day?
What if,
one day,
we spilled our secrets
like explosive ingredients?"

I hold the grenade in a fist
infront of my lips
Robbie reaches for the things we dont want to remember
spilling like dust from an old grenade,
slipping through his fingers
like childhood lies surrendered
to strangers

His expression never changes
as he whispers "Boom"
to an empty room
as we exchange our sleeping bombs
for explosions of the truth.