Weeknight News Reports

We’ve climbed up on the roof before,



barefoot and shivering, at one time



there were no empty rooms, so many people in



the house, sounds of living and maybe



even singing. A voice that wasn’t ours.



We heard it then, under all those blazing stars



 



I mean pixels. Screen glows from within,



pulses in a waterfall, some kind of heartbeat



when we finally get up to close the door



when we do our homework after all these hours.



My mother calls, I want to be right where you are,



sleep, I love you, TV ruins your eyes.



 



It’s 11 pm and death is on my mind,



accidents upon accidents, blood and gore



somewhere in the streets, she



is the time passing and sick, invading dark



people gone missing—could she have been?



No, says my sister, but she’s young and has no power



 



over things we can’t trust and things we can’t see.



I’m young and have no power, am small, never win



but I check the empty driveway, look up at the sky line



inside, it’s my sister; outside, the lights and cars,



and all I want are her footsteps upstairs, the shower



running in the bathroom, her work clothes on the floor.



 



I daydream of flashes and have visions of scars



studding the roads, the bodies, my mother and flowers



I left her, Fiji in the back seat and rosary beads



I prophesy the petals tearing, stems breaking into the night



as glass shatters the world and blends into her skin,



she doesn’t pick up and I’m still watching the war



 



footage from Iraq. Fallujah’s dust rises into towers



and creates people out of nothing, I blink and start



to think my eyes are deceiving me. Behind, my sister snores



and listening I think that the roof would be cold by now, heat



extinguished in the stars above the lamplights hanging, pinned.



This is the part where we find out she dies.