David Moolten
The Base
A fifth grade test
where your brother gets every answer
wrong would at least prove wrong exists.
But arguing with him you wonder
if you even have a brother, until Thanksgiving
resembles the Last Supper
had Norman Rockwell painted it. The boy
who let you play with his Tonka Trucks
leans close, middle-aged and in your face
like he’s caught Judas reaching
for the bread. Your sister just keeps nodding
at your dad while your mom says please
pass the corn like she's turned down
the volume of the house
you grew up in and your emphatic gestures
merely denote waving as in greeting
and not because it's caught fire like Rome
or a cross in a field. Farewell, farewell,
good riddance, to your almost twin, your bunkmate
who with a flashlight declaimed the hero’s creed
from his Spiderman comic.
He just texted you literature
which proves the election stolen by drug companies
that want to put estrogen in the water,
illegal aliens, some maybe from space.
There’s no place like home
because it's gone, the bedrock of everything
bits of pottery and bone.
Update
The Essay
Tonight’s the funeral and you’re at a loss
for what to say, his kind of penance,
like when he insisted a sniveling kid
sound inspired by the downside of milk
swilled from the carton,
persuade him you had second thoughts,
at least on paper, about playing
with a car’s gearshift on a hill.
He’d sentence you to your room for as long
as it took, scratch out all sarcasm,
any eloquence filched from Roget's.
No amount of I-will-nots would do.
Even abused POWs got cue cards
with their propaganda. Wounded by red pen,
you had to wash your own brain to change his mind.
At fourteen, you hit back with your punchline
regarding roses on the charge card,
what about his cheating?
But he left soon anyway, and so did you,
maybe just as misdevoted,
circulating the world like a rough draft
of the man who years late, leans through the door,
if only in your head, shaking his
at how you’ve wasted your time.
Now you get the last word, but know your life
must speak for itself. A chance to explain,
that one small mercy, is gone.
Your brother on a bender plays the role
of blunt town crier, fills in the saints
who bought your mother’s house, have you instead
of cops on speed dial—all's not well at 3 AM.
If only he perseverated more
lyrical soliloquies, Bottom, while shoved
gently into your car, sharing
with the air of a midsummer night
the ballad of his bottomless dream.
Or so you think, which means you talk to yourself
even as you tune out an unshushable voice
like God, or whoever’s at the dials
which keep the stars in the sky,
condemning a comatose world like Tuesday
already has an “Out of Order” sign
on its curtained off room. You’re torn
between vomiting sobs of your own
and a patronizing c'est la vie you’d find
easier if he weren’t delusional
and disillusioned by her porch light
refusing to blink on. Cursing is what’s left
when he gets like this, firmware on the motherboard,
one side of a phone call to the dead.
She was a low-rung angel anyway, good
for clean shirts, a grilled cheese sandwich.
You needn't guess the rest, the dark you are inside
wearing a stranger’s face, normal
to be so close and utterly alone.
David Moolten's last book, Primitive Mood, won the T.S. Eliot Prize (Truman State University Press, 2009). His chapbook The Moirologist won the 2023Poetry International Winter Chapbook Competition and is forthcoming. He lives in Philadelphia.