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January
At first he stumbles a little downstream, surprised
by the current’s push as he
wades in deep enough for his
jeans to stick to his legs.
He closes his eyes,
says the words, chanting
as he draws the knife from his waistband
and cuts into the crooked life line of
his left palm. The scarlet flow
forms a maelstrom around
his knees. He draws his hands into the swirling waters
and feels for the body beneath.
Like a fish caught on a line, it wriggles through his fingers
once,
twice,
before he catches it,
pulls on it,
swabs thick sloops of mud from its emerging surface
until the thing gasps into new life.
The pale skin shines between patches of slick brown and
in his face two bright eyes flash in
the morning’s first stretch like
panned zircon, sifted and rubbed clean.
“Dean, let me go,” are
the first words he says after clearing his throat of sludge.
“This is not natural. The order — life and death,
I’m stuck between. I cling to what isn’t mine — ”
Pout lips push unsaid words back into
the dirt grime at the base of his esophagus,
“Forget the order,” Dean says, “I revised it.”
And there is no more talk
about what should have been.
They are content with what is:
Dean folded around his shivering form
until the larks tire of celebration.
February
“Come off it,” Dean says, but
fascination has already set in and he
is perplexed by the puzzle given. So, instead
he asks twenty-one questions into Dean’s bruised ribs.
Does it fly?
No.
Does it have long teeth?
Yes.
Poison?
Yes.
It is the vetala -- interesting.
“What is?” Dean asks.
That he once dispatched such things without
such grievous injury,
but now…
And even when Dean speaks of
bad days and strange luck and
“only a matter of time,”
he knows to scratch at the bruise a little,
to press him until he lets slip the tiny word,
“Alone.” It’s then that he asks
of the brother unseen and unheard of.
“Sam…he’s sick.”
Then there is no need of questions;
it explains everything.
March
The river is so full after the fifth day of rain,
that it spits him out like a
bottom-dwelling fish to flop in its new marshland.
Round, pale eyes seek their lover’s and find that the
evidence of his slip-up, the
scabs lining his jaw, have gone,
but the weight of his loneliness has marked him;
the creases in
Dean’s face have deepened as if dug out by nimble hands.
As Dean washes him, the grass sulking
underneath cascading handfuls of the river,
he watches the furrows soften, then
harden into bold lines.
“He isn’t getting better.”
Green eyes, made greener by the
budding springtime, crosses the landscape
of fair skin to meet his.
He doesn’t say, but the fleeting anger
that instead becomes a
glance to the
drowning grass blades tells him that
Sam isn’t getting better.
April
After repeated exclamations —
“I’m worried about you.
“You don’t think I miss him?
“He was my friend.
“I loved him too.”
— The blood is drawn and
from the roiling river he
comes to wade overgrown grass
and share in the surprise of the
mammoth, snotty-nosed younger brother
hiding tears behind his shirt sleeve.
Sam is catalogued and labelled in silence before
he pulls him
to his shoulder where
his stubble scratches the back of his neck.
Sam tells him he smells like a sodden dog.
It’s the first time that any of them laugh in a while.
Underneath an inland willow Sam lays against his side
on a picnic blanket.
Sam’s touch is tentative, unconvinced that he isn’t
an apparition of his own making, a fever dream of
his brother’s trust and of his friend’s continued existence.
Wiping the dirt from his cheek doesn’t get Sam closer to
certainty, but he decides he’ll enjoy his fantasy
if it is one.
A damp kiss erases Sam’s ingrained pain all at once and
Dean wonders why he tried so hard to delay this moment.
The rain limps then tires, coming and going in soft bouts
while he kisses the prominent bow of Sam’s collar and Sam
sticks his nose into his spiky hair
to breathe him in like a clean gust of wind.
It’s only when he exhales that he realizes
he’d been suffocating,
slowly,
all the while. His lips
find corded heat past the landmarks of
Sam’s extenuated torso. He wraps his
lips around him, taking Sam in long sips
before swallowing him whole. Dean
makes his nipples bud using lewd provocation,
his lips worship and encourage and then add
salty little threats in whispers.
Brilliant color dashes through his vision
as they ease into him together,
bare
and slicked from spit
and pressing kisses like fire onto his
shoulder,
neck,
and chest
to mimic the slow burn of their coordinated push and pull.
They say small words of love
and of love
until they fill him
and when they lay together, him
between brothers,
the light stretching bands of a faded rainbow over
their desperate hands,
he tells them to love each other
while they can.
When they miss him they hold each other
and whisper words of love
and of love
in the hollow of their necks.
May
Between intermittent static,
the host posed a question:
could there be such a flower
in the untamed jungles of Mexico? A
flower that marks the
feet of the dead. A
flower that feeds upon human life to
purchase its own?
The History Channel believes.
Virgin sacrifice of
heathen beauties are buried
underneath the prim white petals
of a flower that blossoms in the moon light.
Dig the flower out and its roots, scarlet
like cut veins,
are entwined around the remains of its host.
To pluck this flower whole
and milk it of its sustenance is said
to be life-giving, life-ending, life-changing.
“We did not make that,” he says,
to which Sam hums, a tired chuckle kept behind
closed lips. His eyes are too heavy to open, his
breath too labored to speak.
The box springs hesitate as Dean sighs out a silly hope
and
turns from the commercial break.
June
“Show me, where he rests.”
God rays douse the place behind the
western oak in golden light.
Overtaken by the Kansas grass is Mary and John,
flat slabs of stone engraved and graced by
a single yellow flower,
a single silver bullet.
Then Sam lays fresh and
flowerless and bulletless, instead
with a thick book Dean’s only heard about a few
hundred times while at the wheel of the Impala.
When his hand is given,
Dean takes it and
shows his hurt in a smile.
July
With his nose digging into Dean’s
whiskey flannel, he says,
“Don’t follow too quickly,
because I am not where you left me.”
Dean only holds him tighter under
noon’s burnt bulb.
He gets the feeling like he knows.
August
In the late summer his grave is
a kiln and he emerges from the waters
baked all the way through.
His only word is,
“Dean.”
Brows furrowed, nose pinched.
His voice, like compact gravel,
rakes the bruised skin underneath those eyes.
He places a kiss on the dark shadows
and frowns
when they remain.
September
Fall winds across the cuff of his ears,
“Chilly,” he says into Dean’s neck.
Dean’s hand cups the bony shill of his shoulder,
“the leaves are coming in,”
but he means the leaves are going.
They’re the color of supermarket oranges,
vibrant only by comparison.
October
Dean chants apologies to
enliven him,
his creature.
In the autumnal
orange filtering through a thick haze,
crinkles in Dean’s eyes form, grasping for words as
the mud in the shallow graves of his
nails stick to his skin like crescent moons.
“All time is borrowed,” and he cannot be displeased
by less debt on his account.
He cards the first trace of grey in Dean’s temple,
then sees the cut from grey to ear.
“Again?”
“Coyote.”
“You promised, no more.”
“I’m alright, I’m careful.”
Squinting and incredulous, “I know what you mean
by careful,” he says.
“Just once can we skip this part?”
In response, he gives
a little shake, “This part is sacred,” he says as
he acquaints himself with
the fat spread across Dean’s muscled belly, his fingers
pass over the soft mound and go
down,
into the hairs lain flat underneath tight denim.
Dean sweeps the
coarse pads of his fingers into
the curve of his back, catching on the
knot that magicks
a wash of flustered pink from nipple to nose,
A soft whine for deeper touch is buried into
Dean’s collar as he
smiles, thin,
“the days between these moments,
are more painful than
the teeth of a dog or
trickster god
preying on a local congregation.
Nothing will
keep me from seeing your
eyes,
so fuckin’ bright,
cut through sloughed earth,
to return the pieces of myself
I’ve long forgotten.”
November
There is another scar, that
he traces with the scuffed skin of
his forefinger and
thumb.
That he kisses with tender lips, that
he brushes with nose and chin,
but does not mention
between slats of rose dawn,
the television buzzing in the background.
December
Maggots call the pieces of Dean left behind their home as
the twilight hours break over his brow’s beaded sweat.
He staggers to the spot where
the willows interweave above, dripping
blood from open wounds into the water.
A susurrous incantation gives his lover form.
Tawny yellow light edges the overgrown horizon,
weak and reaching as
Dean shudders his breath into his mud-slicked neck.
He pins what remains of Dean against
the slope of the river banks, stalwart
against the wretch and wheeze of his decline.
He cannot bring himself to call Dean careless.
Idiotic.
Reckless.
Oafish.
Instead he finds what little is left unscathed
and milks it,
swooning into the gentle curve of Dean’s ear.
I love you,
I love you.
The sun rises above the weeds,
breaks across his skin to
flay flesh from bone.
I love …
Dean lays in the ashes of him, eyes
unblinking in the warmth of the new day.
In the year that follows,
thick bushes hedge the river,
dots of white unfurl in
the moonlight into
lovely orchids.