Unwriting My Sister as a Teddy Bear
I’ve behaved poorly every winter
I can remember, my awfulness in each
separated only by degrees,
secrets piled like snowdrifts at the corners
of rooms I wouldn’t stay in.
Hiding was easier.
I stuffed myself in the closet
of our pit-city apartment—
walls infested with neighbors
tiptoeing through roach powder
caked like salt-circle prayers—
my sister above me, her small body
throwing up what little warmth
our family offered—a recipe of lemons
and gelled mentholyptus to keep us quiet.
Her vomit running from the top bunk
down to me smelled warm and too green.
I had to get out of there.
I disappeared
because the air outside was too full
of breaking—
vows shattering; locks snapping
too loud for lungs that barely held.
The familiar sound of domestic violence
brings a comfort
of knowing
what’s next.
Embracing the facts early and often
can help you put at least the length
of a teddy bear’s arm
between its sound and yourself.
Later, these winters of paying the cold
forward, before it reached me, translated:
stealing partners, and partners’ passwords,
eating nine boxes of pizza rolls to swallow
my sexuality, never finding the end
of a bottle, arguing against the brittle logic
of my own survival—
because proving I mattered felt better
than knowing I might not.
But let me rewrite these winters:
I pull my sister from the bunk,
our laughter is what breaks open the dark,
we are cherry blossoms bursting
through an imminent thaw,
we lie in peace across our bedroom sheets,
left to mature in a natural sun.
We remake the closet into a fort,
walls drawn tighter not to trap us
but to keep us safe.
My sister’s eyes aren’t buttons anymore,
she isn’t puking synthetic cotton,
I don’t use her small body as armor.
Outside, the snowlight waits,
soft as her hand in mine.
We step into the cold and make it ours,
reaching for the frostbitten branches
and claiming them as swords.
No harsh realities or words can follow here—
and if they try,
we let them land,
then split their heads like seeds in the muck,
each fracturing skull
a shot at a promise of something
that finally grows.
Copyright © Jaymee Thomas | Year Posted 2024
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