i was where i belonged
Poetry
by Eli Sahm
locked up behind eyelashes
impregnable as bars and pulsing through
the first time i saw my baby brother
how i loved him so much
like myself
i wanted to kill him
like my dad
the therapist says
i’m obsessed with oblivion
when my dad was eighteen he found his dad
hanging in the shed like a boring miracle
on a spring morning so green it hurt the face
there’s no way to come remotely close to the immense everyday
commonplace monstrosity of what actually happened
how when he opened the door the body wasn’t
spinning slowly as i always picture it
but the shed was so still
that when he laughed
face-to-face at the calm
togetherness of the work boots
the sound dropped from above
outside him like he was sharing it
with himself
Eli Sahm received his MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. He was a finalist for the 2016 NC State Annual Poetry Contest and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Your Impossible Voice, Occulum, Rabid Oak, Show Your Skin, The Indianapolis Review, and Cotton Xenomorph.