Super Bowl Sunday

Sarah Layden

 

Three days after my sister left him

she named the bottomed-out growl

in the pit of her stomach hunger

and went cross-country skiing.

 

Gamely, cheerfully, even

she borrowed my boots

and locked into the skis

I’d barely used since moving home. 

The rental shop had closed early for

the big game, so we took turns with

the single pair of narrow planks, front ends

raised optimistically, side-by-side

like two bodies in a bed

untouching.

 

This sister,

my only. In photos from our childhood,

she looms over my shoulder

in a matching dress. I am picturing

our blue plaid with red cherries. (“No, I think

red with blue flowers,” she says, in our daily

e-mail conversation. “The cherries?

Grandma’s tablecloths.”) 

I do remember my arms are folded lightly

Atop the fake wood fence at Olan Mills.

Defying odds and our mother’s spit

my cowlick has sprung up again

between the car and the photo studio.

No one has to ask: my sister unclasps her white

vinyl purse, removes a comb. Her small hand

tames me. Little sisters of sisters

live lives twice-mothered.

 

When she told him, he screamed abandonment.
Stepped out of the apartment as if to smoke
a cigarette. The world’s longest cigarette:
three years later he’s still out smoking, somewhere.
This morning she declined pancakes,
nibbled at a triangle of toast. She shrinks
with refusals when I pass a plate.
In my late twenties I’m exactly one inch taller,
a linebacker to her drum major. I keep trying to feed
her. She will only say No, I’ve had enough.
 
In these ski boots she gains height, hovering again
before setting off in the thin slush.
Winters in Indiana, we take
what we can. Wobbling once,
she turned to see if I’d seen. Mostly I
watched her back and wondered
what her face looked like.
 
Her first attempt
and she did not fall
until I remarked on her stability.
The graying snow held her. Green grass
peeked through the tracks. Jeans soaked
like an accident, laughing too hard
to stand. A pretty beetle on its back.
Take off the skis, she cried into the still air.
I went to her, my cold and stiff fingers
fumbling to unlock the bindings. 

   


Sarah Layden’s fiction appears or is forthcoming in The Evansville Review, Artful Dodge, Vestal Review, Contrary, Diet Soap, Hecale and 42opus. Her most recent nonfiction was published in Opium Magazine, flashquake and Indianapolis Monthly, and her poetry also can be found in the upcoming anthology Just Like a Girl. She is working on a novel and teaches writing at IUPUI and Marian College in Indianapolis.

  

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