Poetry: All forms & styles|Amanda Leal|"Clues"

In the mornings, I go to my mother’s apartment
with warm paper cups of coffee. She trades me Newport cigarettes,
and we sit on the cement steps
that face the alley, stamping the butts into her rose bush
while we discuss my brother, his belongings scattered
on the couch behind us. The sun pulls up on its rope
over the concrete structures, the light shattering in the chicken wire
dividing the buildings, and I resign my cup of coffee
as though going to work. I pull up the brown leather cushions
like soft thick tongues, and sift through layers of fur
from a dog that died last year.

I know the drugs better than my mother. The white powders
and brown powders, gummy substances in baggies
the size of my thumb nail, the pills with inscriptions
like apartment numbers: R029, E905, cut in halves
like rounded rooftops. My mother remarks how strong
our love could be, to still care, and I tell her of the brass urn
still in the trunk of my car, from two years ago,
when Alex overdosed outside my apartment door,
the immaculate white Converse
still in my closet, that he never got the chance to wear.
In the mornings, I notice the clean white eyelets,
the shoe laces never untied. I remember his mother
at his viewing, bent over the cardboard casket
he lay in before they incinerated his body,
the waffle print fabric of his hospital gown, ice packs strapped
to his calves for the brief trip. In the mornings,
she must rise and search his old bedroom for clues,
the empty baggies in his desk drawers, or the halved pills
beneath his mattress, the way she traced his scalp
for lumps, inspected his forearms for entry points, or bruising
that surfaced like little, yawning mouths beneath his skin.

In the mornings, I sit with my mother as we wait
for my brother to come home, his figure illuminated
by the rising sun, the way he will lope down the alley
like a stray animal, the long loose sleeves
hanging to his wrists like bells, his hair that thins in patches,
as though it has been scorched by the sun. We build a perimeter
of cigarettes in the dirt, watching the sunlight
cut the alleyway into divisions, the light and the dark,
like the living and the dead.