Ink on paper: David Medalla: 1967
Funny how we don’t need alcohol anymore

to get each other to open. There is a thin

em dash along our mouths where confessions

no longer shimmy, the silence becoming our own

way of telling each other: let me in. The last time

I let anyone touch me this close, I was learning

how to aim a gun. For the last few December

thirty-firsts my grandfather took my hands in his and we

shot at the bathroom wall. It was New Year’s Eve and everyone

in my neighborhood had something shaking

in their hands. How common it is to mistake our hands

for explosives. Napalm knuckles, dynamite fingers. Today my father

roars for the same rooster fight over and over, and my brother

plays Fortnite again, aims like a blind man

waist-deep in need for color, the way

koi needs water to breathe, the way I need pain

to remember. I shoot at the concrete again

and again so it remembers—a black hole in the wall

where a memory should be.