There’s two of them and they sit to my left and to my right,
soaked in two types of sweat that drip onto an old photo album.
One lives in the bottom bunkbed, small hands smearing the walls
beneath me. The other lives on the roof outside my teenage bedroom.
He stays outside, older and messier, and sits legs dangled off
the side until he leaves the roof, the mountain home, and behind he
leaves us, waiting and wondering what could be outside the window,
up the New York Hawksnest’s spine. The younger grows and though
our memory lives in that bunkroom, we separate, divided by
drywall and he plays football in a sweat soaked, lean spine.
In the mountain house, there’s two of them, three types of sweat.
One healthy, far away. The other struck with slickness that comes
from addiction. Me, a constricted spine. I grow crooked. The thrum
of the tube stretches loud as the med tech’s face disappears behind
the mute white ceiling and I lie still, wearing a polyethylene braced
spine. But, when my eyes shut, instead of the thrumming tube we’re
all in the bunkbed, in the dead end home, crickets replacing machines,
and steady moonlight on the mountain top. Sweat has been wiped clean–
the pale sickness on my brother’s face disappears and the youngest holds
up his small hands towards me. I lift him. Back in time, our arms to spines.