I Have Known You for an Uncomfortably Long Time

By Nick Lavender

After Long Live Love or Charming Countryside, Max Ernst, 1923

We can hear the resounding clap of waves, 

gentle enough that they might be

your mother’s robin’s-egg hung-to-dry sheets

whipping in the wind, held fast to the clothesline 

by pins that were given to her by her own long dead mother. 

The blue in the tips of your fingers 

makes me wonder how long you have been here

Where we writhe, each wholly absorbed

in some gesturing Other, welcoming 

the touch that in any other moment would be intrusion 

We can smell the far-off acrid scent 

of oil, pervasive enough that it might be 

my father’s workclothes when he arrives home 

eyes drooping, mouth trapped in that horrible unmoving line

Flattened once again by the rig

You tell me that the red of his crooked nose 

matches the ribbon I wear

I tell you that your blue fingertips 

match your mother’s sheets

A tremor takes its place in perpetuity, bursting  

deep in our bones — is this how parents feel?

We know how children feel

When they must watch as their mother

begins to give away the items most precious

to her in the world and as the wrinkles

gouged in their father’s face shoot deeper 

every time they visit

The house sold

The cat given away

The old Ford silent in the garage

instead of grumbling its way up the overpass.

Nick Lavender is a sixteen-year-old who attends the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. He lives with two dogs, two cats, two parents, and one sister. Ekphrasis is his kryptonite.