Give Up Don’t Give Up
was my brother’s advice
three years after his doctor
said six weeks My brother
years earlier ahead of me
on a path above the tree line
with lightning rolling in
so we ran all the way back
laughing in flashing light
Today snow somehow gathers
in the crook of a pear tree
despite another shooting
into a crowd of bodies
despite a missile that turned
small apartments into ash
despite the names you whisper
to yourself most days
What my brother means
is that you have to lay
your whole teetering pile down
these shorter and shorter winters
the monstrous and unfair
thing that could happen to any
one a disappeared kid
four hundred years of history
like a giant stone
either you know is pushing
you down a mountain and try
to slow the weight or you
slide down pretending it’s not
and all the people (how many)
who dim their lights inside
caves they built and then
lose track of the path out
Lay it all down my brother
said so I say You can’t
carry it all all the time
Yes the muscle in your chest
hurts Of course you are
broken Give all of it up
so you can feel the two
bags of air fill again
An hour will come an hour
when they do not My brother
was eight years past his last
when his organs began to fail
That crook that light his hand
in mine I feel even now
The Stone
I find a stone a little smaller
than half a human heart inside
my chest again this morning.
I forget about it, but in the early
dark when I am quiet and sipping
it is still there. It rises and falls
with each breath—my right
lung, my sternum and ribs
make space for it, as there is
almost always room for one more
on a crowded bus. I first felt it
sometime after two people I called
mine died within two months.
It is oblong and smooth
along the edges. Twenty months now
with this inside my body.
I whisper, Is there something
you’d like to know? And: what
are you protecting me from?
It gives no answer I can hear.
Second Person
You wake on a cold fall
morning with two holes
to the right of your heart
that you feel the edges of
when the wind is really
blowing, or when you
hustle around town, a time
when you might call and say
into the ether—voicemail—
just thinking about you
but someone else answers
that number now and so
you leave a message here.
You think they’ll visit
in a dream and explain
but wake dreamless
thinking you’re his little
brother, her youngest son—
my baby, she called you
into your forties.
Last night you sat around
a tall fire with friends—
the only safe way
to see these men right now—
and toasted a late guitarist
who could make the whole
burning world with his
fingers and send it driving
up over a thousand bodies.
The weight is real on your
chest, shoulders, temples, as is
early light through the honey
locust’s spikes almost
as long as your pinkie.
You know we are an
awful species—we kill
each other or ourselves
regularly, we invent
new ways to infect the earth
with our trash and love letters—
I, I, I. I can’t right now,
but maybe you can see
the nearly infinite ways
we can be beautiful, like
a small black disc passed
along the ice to a place
where you didn’t know
you’d be but then you
were. Your brother’s chuckle
after that pass, your
mother’s earnest cheering.
Your mother handed you
her ever-present gold-rimmed
sunglasses—this was decades
ago—said, Look,
so now on this morning
this strange light
turned up by cheap lenses
outlines your beloved
your two sons your two
bearded rescue dogs and
you sit with a tree’s thicket
of spikes and you sit
with the two people not here
and then stand and make
sure to lay your hand
on each of the bodies
that are still here
before you leave.
Gibson Fay-LeBlanc's first collection of poems, Death of a Ventriloquist, won the Vassar Miller Prize and was featured by Poets & Writers, and his second, Deke Dangle Dive, was published by CavanKerry Press in 2021. His poems have appeared in magazines including the New Republic, Tin House, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and Orion. He has helped lead community arts organizations including The Telling Room, SPACE Gallery, and Hewnoaks and currently serves as executive director of the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance.