I Remember You Most As A Summer Distraction

I'm reading Ampersand Revisited by Simeon Berry who is a comic book loving poet in Somerville that I have somehow never crossed paths with. As far as I know.

I suspect the book was recommended to me by Elizabeth Doran at The Grolier Poetry Book Shop. 

​The book is a complex narrative story told in three differently formatted poems. It didn't inspire me to use his formats or his subject matter (both of which I enjoyed) but it did remind me that there was a story I'd planned on writing earlier this year and never got around to.  Unfortunately, before I could get to the story the line: "Your sister farts paste" came into my mind, and a series of short related poems sort of began to write themselves. So, here's the first part of what is tentatively called The Completely Accurate Story Of My Real Friend Bargo Whitley​.

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I.

Your sister farts paste          you said combing the kelp over your freshly shaved head           which my parents warned me not to ask about

I don't have a sister           I said checking the horseshoe crab for sand fleas

Then who is that girl           you asked           always hanging from your mother's waist like a short screaming third leg?

There was no girl that summer           or the summer before           or any summer that you and I were alive           and when I asked my mother about a sister           she would tell me the plots to reruns of The Brady Bunch           paying particular attention to the slumber party episode          where Marcia is punished for drawing a picture of her teacher as a hippopotamus           though Marcia was drawing George Washington           and while everything gets sorted out in the end           it does seem that the whole world was out to keep Marcia from having her slumber party

I spent the next year believing that there was some sort of miscarriage           and that you were like a kid in a Stephen King novel           and your cancer had given you the power to see people who had already died           or who were never quite born           But it turned out my father didn't want any more children           and none of the powers you got from chemotherapy were very special          and maybe that's why you lived