July 15, 1992

2:53 am


My sister begs me to let her come to my loft apartment after my nephew’s funeral. “You never let me come over. You never let me spend the night. Come on.”



The giggling chatter, the tinkling bell like kissing sounds she is making with her lover, which are keeping me awake, suddenly stop.



From below my loft, I hear, “uh, oh,” followed by the butterfly laughter of their kisses.



This is no false alarm like the last time when she chatted delightfully all the way as our father drove us to the hospital only to be returned home with the twin girls still nestled inside her.



This time the blue dye from the patterned Indian fabric stains my Japanese cotton mattress, my futon ruined by the tattoo of embryonic fluid.



She instructs me, smiling, to get pads from the convenience store at the corner.



I walk pass the first living marsupial I’ve ever seen, both of us scared.



possums on the porch

my sister’s future dangling —

a family scatters


Jourdan Imani Keith, Seattle’s Civic Poet, is our Poet in Residence for October.

Previously: “Let Seattle Be”, ”Nympharium“, and "Tongues of Fire", which takes place 24 hours before the events in the poem above.