Summary

In “Black Magic Brother” the speaker imagines her brother as a magician, the meth he smokes as the women in his life, and the drugs that are also women as the magic tricks he performs. She recounts how her brother’s magic tricks have split their father in two, and have made their mother disappear. She and her family, the speaker says, are her brother’s perpetual audience, waiting for something to break and free them from the show.

“A Brother Named Gethsemane” begins by associating the brother with Jesus. It connects him with the garden where Jesus was arrested the night before the crucifixion. The poem uses surreal imagery to speak to the brother either when he was a child or as if he were still a child, comparing him to Peter Pan, and, in the first stanza, finishing with a wish to...