Robert H. Winner Memorial Award - 2021

                                     I thought I should tell my sister not to
go there again, never go there,
                                                   our grandfather dying
of some disease that makes him have heart attacks
in winter, the thick plastic sheeting over every
                                                               window, such meager
light in those rooms and you can’t
                         see out, our uncle burning
through his liver and crashing everyone’s car, whole family
squatting in that slumped house full of
                                                   newspapers and ashtrays,
the ceiling tiles falling, porch steps sinking deeper
every year into the ground, and our brother glowing
with a terrible manic fever
                                     or sinking, too, or making
stilted amends or angry we weren’t there to nurse him
through the last fever.

                                     But I don’t say it—don’t go
                                                   home,
                                                               and she goes,
makes that northward trudge, past all
Starbucks, all Targets, past interstate highways and also
                                                               the hope of ever
distinguishing herself from the soil from which she
                                                                           sprang
or crawled or never
            fully crawled, and this time Dad
                          tells her two things she calls to tell me.

                                                               One,
when they were preparing to eat the new potatoes and peas
that are maybe most of the reason
my sister visits at all—that tenderness, that mouthful
                                                                          of sweet green,
like going home but without the pain, or with a little less
pain—and she was looking for a spoon,
                                                     my father said I’ll have to wash it.
There’s only one. Your brother
               used the rest to cook his drugs.

                                                               Two,
a boy of seven,
buttoned into his good shirt, pants ironed, our father let
the music spin him in the center of the school gym,
                                                              shedding
twelve toothaches and failed scout badges
                                                    and his father’s
unaccountable rage like spare change flung
from his pockets, and then he went home
                                                              good-tired
and still too buoyant to sleep, so he stood just inside
his bedroom door, listening to his parents
                                                     in the hallway ask his older
sister How did he do at his first dance?
and she said He looked like a loser, and that’s why,
             our father told my sister,
                                        he never danced again.


                                        And still I don’t say it—never
go home—because what about the front door
always unlocked, damp boxes
                                                        of rubber dolls and crayoned
drawings, a whole basement full of years
and years and days, same basement where the uncles
working on the cracked foundation found
                                                        a jar of buried cash, hundreds
of disintegrating dollars some government agency had to
                                                                    microscope together,
send us a check that kept us in
          fuel oil and hamburger meat for months.
                                                        And the photo albums
blooming mold there in the dark—me
bathing in the sink, my sister with her eye patch
in the arms of the mother who left
                                      those photographs behind.
What about the few blessed days after snowmelt
when lilac mixes with the scent of mud
                                                        and you can only think
                                                                                        new, new?
You can only believe we’ll be reborn together
                                                                            somewhere else
somewhere easier to breathe but the air
                                                         still smells this
                                                                             sweet
What about that money dust—our inheritance
                                      finally unearthed—and the way we
                                                                             dig in, the very ground
                                                         beneath us a lottery we can’t not play?

Poem originally appeared in Poetry. Reprinted with the permission of the poet.