MY BROTHER LOVED STEPHEN KING
Books lined his shelves, worn mass-market spines of one-word titles,
Carrie and Christine and Misery, It with its thumb-soft cover of a paper boat
nosing into a storm drain where three green talons hinted at something
much worse. Shining hardbacks for his Christmas pile in my parents' closet,
stories I was too afraid to read bound for his precise, chronological rows.
My brother presided over a remote like a monarch, forever lording it
out of my reach. The night I couldn't sleep after watching horror movies
at an older girl's house, my mom said Say no next time, like it was okay
to tell someone what I did and did not want, like I could even know that
myself. Twenty years after I first feared it might be true, I said the one word
girlfriend at my brother's house, my heart a paper boat in my throat. Afraid
of nothing, he tossed me the remote and asked what I wanted to watch
for once, and did my girlfriend have a name? Andy, I breathed, looking
at his shelves, fuller now with even more stories – just words some writer
like me put to paper, his own nightmares laid bare in the light of day. I said
her name again, made it real: a dreamscape, a needful thing, a talisman.
Betsy Housten is a queer writer and massage therapist who earned her MFA at the University of New Orleans and makes her home in Brooklyn. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Autostraddle, Yellow Arrow Journal, Rogue Agent, Lunch, Bone & Ink Press, Little Red Tarot, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets, Best of the Net, and the Pushcart Prize. You can find her at betsyhoustenwrites.com.
NOTE: This poem was previously published by Maudlin House.