Saint Elizabeth
Rachel Contreni Flynn
1.
A scarecrow came for breakfast, sat in my sister’s seat and refused to eat. It combed its straw hair
with shredded hands, fluffed its limbs and made chit-chat, happy faces, horrid little predictions.
2.
She was blonde and tough
and flawless in her
flute-playing. I thought
she played to wake me
on winter mornings,
the sweet Gavotte.
I was wrong. She despised
the dark animal of me,
my dirt-scent, my clawing,
my knotted hair. But the flute
told its falsehoods, then she left
as a ghost: coldly, lightly
as the Gavotte, as birdshot.
And me, a possum caught
in the yard at dawn.
3.
My sister left for a few weeks, and the lid lifted
off the stock pot. The house filled with the possibility
of eating bread dunked in the savory thickness
of her absence. I was happy. Happy to sit
in the kitchen, thinking. Happy to carry
the baby – a sack of sweet apples against me.
She was gone, and I was glad the steel edge
of her had stopped carving all the faces
in the house into shriveling dolls, gouging eyes
out of the simple starch of us.
4.
Even the hospital bore her name, called her Saint.
I too was sick. Of driving and sitting. Of nodding.
I knew the big building that held her would not heal her.
At home I gathered mulberries in the woods.
I told my brother stories in the barn that began
Once there was a bag of sadness locked in the attic.
5.
Because she harms herself
we’re scared into applause, and because she steals everything shiny,
a frantic magpie, we creep behind her: silent butlers returning the lighters,
the cufflinks, the neighbors’ spoons and coins.
Because she forbids us
to forbid her the liquor cabinet, the car crashes, we pray she’ll go away
like a bit of milkweed silk. Instead, she returns, a dog in pain no one
will put down, that stains the carpets and wakes us all night with sharp barks
until someone rises to let her out, knowing she won’t go,
and she won’t.
6.
The girl lies small, pale, naked in bright sunlight
across a tightly made bed. She ages before my eyes –
bones rise up, legs lengthen, but no hair anywhere
except the hay-lightness around her head which turns
and her mouth, the only red in the room, begins to scream.
This is my sister, it seems. I close the door and back away.
7.
Even in dreams
I back away.
I forsake her.
I laugh and run.
It is too much. The brightness of her,
and the love. I understand certain things
about religion. How it is to continue
to believe in the implausible thing.
As a child, I only wanted my sister’s body
against me in sleep. Even now I dream
of her breath in my hair. I wake feeling
saved, then bitten and torn down.