First Place in the Ceiling 200 Contest (2021)
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You’re Gone, but the Cannonballs Still Go Off
Our uncle you never met is a sternwheeler man. He says, “The mind is a Mississippi with betraying snags. You can get where you going but not how you expecting.”
You were my only brother. Mama kept herself with chores and cooking. A baby just turned boy, you went back to earth with a cross the size of your chest. Raising you was making a sieve of my life, aiming not to pass on what will tear up your insides. You were the only mine I ever had, better than me.
I stopped talking the morning you died. Our uncle came back home months later, told Mama he’s used to the silent type on the river. He goes on about the hundreds of cannonballs in the river bottom from the war.
“When you aren’t ready, you can’t go nowhere straight, jostling from one cannonball to another like cypress roots.”
I close my eyes, turn my thoughts from your locked, purpled mouth (you weren’t sleeping anymore) to your wrist, your only fat fold, hand like bread in mine. What I say or don’t won’t make anyone safe. What destroyed us doesn’t disappear, only sinks to where we will hit it again.
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Heather Dobbins is a native of Memphis, Tennessee. She is the author of two poetry collections, In the Low Houses (2014) and River Mouth (2017), both from Kelsay Press. She graduated from the College Scholars program at the University of Tennessee and earned her M.F.A. from Bennington College. Her writing has been published in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Rumpus, TriQuarterly Review, and Women’s Studies Quarterly, among others. For twenty years, she has worked as an educator (Kindergarten through college) in Oakland, California; Memphis, Tennessee; and currently, Fort Smith, Arkansas. Please see heatherdobbins.net for more.