Kayleb Rae Candrilli
Which is almost as long / as the Trojan war. The year / my father took her was all oil spills
ON TRESPASSING
In rural America, beware
of dog signs are security
systems posted, point
blank in single pane
windows. The bullet always so much
worse than the bang.
Sometimes I imagine I never left
the fields in which I was unwelcome.
Sometimes I can still
see my father hiding
plywood riddled with rusty
nails under a bed of fall
leaves. In rural America
the warning is to draw
first blood. I remember
the ATVs with their popped
tires, the neighbors’ horses
with their tetanused hooves.
You know, friendship
is so unlikely to bloom
where you are unwanted.
My father and the land
taught me everything
about being small and quiet.
They taught me
not to want
a thing.
THOUGH ODYSSEUS WAS GONE FOR 20 YEARS MY SISTER WAS GONE FOR 9
Which is almost as long
as the Trojan war. The year
my father took her was all oil spills
and counting the distance between us
with cigarettes, flipped end over end
for thousands of watery miles.
My father only loves fentanyl
and his own brass hands.
It has always been this way.
Yesterday, when my sister escaped
in the middle of the night,
she wore
black eyes
and a pillowcase
for luggage. In the morning,
my mother made
her waffles—like she would have
any other Sunday.
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KAYLEB RAE CANDRILLI is author of What Runs Over with YesYes Books, which was a 2017 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in transgender poetry. Their second collection, All the Gay Saints, won the 2018 Saturnalia Book Contest and is forthcoming in Spring 2020. You can read more of Candrilli’s work here.
