Some women are bedroom doors that men unlock without asking.
When my younger brother asks me how to tie a noose with only
my bare hands, I break down crying and teach him how to smash
the plates in the cupboard without making any sound instead.
Eventually all four of us have to resort to eating four-dollar
frozen dinners because there are no more dishes left.
On my grandmother’s birthday we light eighty-three candles,
then watch them all melt down to the wick while our party
hats tilt, lopsided, on our heads like falling buildings.
Then we change our minds and subtract fifty-six
of the remaining blackened stubs, leaving the rest to stand
tall in the frosting as a memorial to all twenty-seven
people killed in Connecticut this week.
We say things like “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”
but how do we explain the fact that a bullet shoots out of a gun
so fast that it can literally rip through the sternum
in 1.5 seconds? When are we going to realize
that the 2nd Amendment was written by a group of men
in a time when assault rifles weren’t even invented yet?
My brother wants to kick away the chair underneath him
because he thinks that the fact
that my cousin Andrew unlocked my sister’s door
without asking
is enough to make him want to kill himself.
You’re so young, I tell him. No one deserves to die at your age,
especially not those twenty children.