Green Jacket

by Brandon Shane

I feel mud and water

hold the same wetness

how my father grew cancer

in his lungs and brain

the way my Japanese mother

returned to saké

when coughs interrupted sleep

her little suicides

his tumorous cigarettes

how after enough devotion

you stop hiding the knife

let the stubborn aspirate,

and my first real love

her blue eyes dirty blonde

only the first three years

the other two are toilet-dead

soulmates decline with stillness

and foul smells: the minutes apart

were torture touch kidnapped

insomnia put it into a pot:

but days now are getting away

from other days the words

uttered are unusable

without her context so I

met a stranger

she tells me

I am the right whore

at the wrong time

and it was time to leave

a penniless poet like me

couldn’t survive the man

with better timing

and something to give

she cannot later

read alone.

---

Brandon Shane is a poet and horticulturist born in Yokosuka, Japan. You can see his work in Rattle, Trampset, Variant Lit, The Chiron Review, Stone Circle Review, IceFloe Press, The Marrow Poetry, One Art Poetry, among others. He graduated from Cal State Long Beach with a degree in English.

Find him on Twitter @HalfTheLobster

"Green Jacket" is his first appearance in The Itch.