Your brother held you down as a toddler,
singeing your eyebrows with his cigarette.
They don’t grow anymore but that’s ok —
makeup is for concealing the past.
Later, he locked you alone in a cellar
but that’s ok — he was just mad at the world.
Your uncle held you close as drunk and out of control,
he wrapped the car around a street pole; glass was everywhere.
But that’s ok — you just don’t drive and the scars are small.
And again, you brother. He tossed you from the roof.
Forgetting to fly like your sister the raven,
you plummeted to the ground, bones and limbs disentangling.
But that’s ok — it was you fault anyways.
You tell me your stories
as if I was telling you about the time
when my sister borrowed my favourite shirt without permission
or my parents wouldn’t let me go to the dance
or the cute boy on the school’s hockey team teased me in front of his friends.
In any other town I have known, or at least how I have known
any other town I have known, in any of those towns
your stories would be abuse, a file for Children’s Aid,
a case in the courts, front page news.
But this is a small town in the North where we have only begun to dialogue
and your status card still sets you even further apart from any town I have known.
Here, your brother was just being bratty and your uncle hit a patch of ice.
Here, you still love them so it’s not a matter of forgiveness.
Here, you can tell me these stories so mater of fact.
You don’t know that I know there are towns outside of this one.
