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Scrotum and Bone

You learned to masturbate while I learned
to menstruate. How thin the wall separating
our adolescent groaning. In our shared
bathroom, my obscene arsenal of hygienics.
In the hallway, a shelf of your hard-core porn.
Mom/Dad comatose in front of the TV, mistaking
money for generosity. Dysmenorrheaic, I rocked
in bed watching rabbits gnaw carrots on the wall.
I heard you blow your nose into a sock. We had
nowhere to go. Every so often, a source-less light
shone under our door cracks. There we were.
And the next day we were old.

 

Bulb


All I could do was take more late-night Olive
Garden shifts, adjust my maroon cummerbund
and hustle bottomless pasta. I parked my rusty
Mustang on the south-east pad of driveway, which
is how I got the name Prima Dona from you, forced
to street-park the K-car inherited from mom after her
seventh asylum. Can you explain why we didn’t speak
for 16 years? Your guinea pig named Jeremy was half
white and half brown. You liked to make sketches of
him in hats. I mistook his turd for a raisin but didn’t
realize until I swallowed. How was I supposed to know
what to do about every pimply boy wanting to stick his
dick in my mouth? If there were houses on our street
where that was not normal, I never went in them. Mom
thought your porn was a cute distraction. We always knew
what was coming when she started planting daffodils.

 

 

image: Andromeda Veach


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