portrait of my missing brother caught in a spiderweb

by Steven Espada Dawson

there’s a planet where it rains diamonds
my brother might turn his umbrella
upside down before disappearing
he told me how scared he is
of spiders it’s not the legs but all those
eyes he said he never liked being my brother
spent a whole childhood shuffling
cards waiting for the right order we laid
belly down on our living
room floor making history I believe in
his return like I believe in bay leaves
that the tree outside my teenage bedroom
was a cherry blossom until one young lover
promised it was a magnolia while wedding drunk
I heard someone say ornamental pear trees
smell like semen today is your birthday
brother the porchlight implodes
the beads of rain caught in the window screen
twilight pearls strangled
by a spiderweb I wait for you
to rematerialize a coin behind the ear
of my childhood with these eyes
I see you with these eyes
I will not let you leave

Steven Espada Dawson is from East Los Angeles and lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where he is the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Fellow in Poetry at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. The son of a Mexican immigrant, he is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Most recently, his work appears in AGNI, Guernica, Kenyon Review, Ninth Letter, and Poetry.