Sister As Ekphrasis

By Micah Cozzens

There was some space for us—three kids, two bedrooms.

Brother got one, sisters the other: two girls, one room,

and so I heard her come in the night a man

offended her pride, and when another made her cry,

and when her friends said something they didn’t mean,

and when her first job wore her to threads,

and she never muffled her noises for her sister’s sake,

lacking the self-consciousness of maturity, and

I was made audience to Magdalene tears, and

too her secret life, journal entries transcribed in dim light

to inform future readers of her American girlhood

spent the usual way: waiting in snaked cafeteria lines,

playing instruments against metronomes keeping time,

church pews that carved her back into interesting shapes,

curfew-defying drives in search of good times

but not too good—already, she suspected

there was something better in a far room, that

adulthood would be a promising development,

with maybe a necktie husband, a soft-skinned daughter.

I watched her, intimate to her nail-chewing,

confederate in her praying, observer of her migraines.

She was my introduction to art, a character

study who walked into my peripheral after

her fast food shift, a sister who only once

acknowledged me watching, winked and said

“Go back to sleep.”

We have not shared a room for twenty years, but when I lie in bed, I imagine her

nearby, still a girl, carrying into the bedroom

her silhouette like a spell that makes things

as they were, and I can feel again for her what I did not then

know how to name: tenderness, to the point of pain