Michael Simms: Breath

No one could enter the bathroom
where Elizabeth had shot herself, bits of bone
blood and brain everywhere.
We closed the door and tried not to think

She felt unloved, but those of us who loved her
gathered at her house beside the Llano River
to mourn in our separate ways.
It was spring in the hill country
and bluebonnets covered the fields

My sister’s husband locked himself in his room for days
kept alive by my mother handing glasses of water
through a cracked door.
My sister’s sons sat around a fire pit
with their friends, dazed teenage boys
crouching by the embers, refusing tears

We brothers stunned and helpless, trying to be helpful
around the house, kept breaking things
cursing and crying. After an unbearable silence
Bob said it’s a hell of a thing, isn’t it?
A hell of a thing

I remember walking into the Baptist church
standing at the back of the sanctuary
seeing a hundred people,
wondering who they all were,
so many Latinos with their children,
strangers at my sister’s funeral.
Then I remembered my brothers had married
Latinas, generous people I barely knew,
who surely loved my sister

As children we were taught to hate Mexicans
and now we were Mexicans.
I started laughing, then wheezing uncontrollably,
panic rushing though me in waves.
Faces I didn’t know turned to look at me
not unkindly, but with concern
and my nephew Andrew Narvaez,
a sweet kid I liked, took me gently by the arm
through the red doors of the sanctuary
to stand in the shade at the edge of the parking lot
beneath the wide arms of a live oak tree

He stood silently beside me
until I could weep.
We waited for the others —
my brothers, my parents,
our large Mexican family
merging quietly and driving off
into the soft blue hills

When we pulled into the driveway,
a woman was placing a mop and bucket
in the trunk of her car. She came to us,
hugged my mother and said quietly.
I’m so sorry, Janie Lu. We all loved her

In the house, the bathroom door was open,
the light on, the surfaces immaculately scrubbed.
The neighbor whose name I didn’t know
had come to the house unbidden
to scour tile and porcelain, to pick
bits of bone from the floor,
to wipe up smears of brain,
to clean blood-spray from the ceiling,
to wash every sign of self-murder away

People say the world is an ugly place and maybe it is
but sometimes people are so damned kind
I can barely breathe

Copyright 2023 Michael Simms. From Strange Meadowlark (Ragged Sky, 2023)

Michael Simms is the founding editor of Vox Populi. His poetry collections include American Ash, Nightjar, Strange Meadowlark and Jubal Rising (Ragged Sky, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025). His speculative fiction novels include Bicycles of the Gods and The Hummingbird War (Madville 2022, 2026); and The Talon Trilogy (Madville, 2023, 2024, 2025).