Ten years later one of my brothers would be in the ground
and the other dead to me, but in the summer of ’96
we were all at the same concert in Camden
the two of them barely young enough to get away with being addicts
tan-shouldered, brag-drunk as piss on the hill above the stage
picking fights with college kids, and me
on the cusp of nineteen, sentimental, thinking it was some kind of
turning on a karmic axis to be smoking weed with my big brothers
while Kowalczyk rolled the earth into the sky
dampened blue to gray to purple, and the instrumental that lasts three
minutes on the album lasted for three whole fucking
days, Look where all this talking got us
drums hitting that same spot until it bruised, and the guitar rallying
again, and again, and again, and I thought Jesus, Ed, isn’t this overkill,
but it was
sex and feedback and the apocalypse up there, the whole world came
to an end, and that was the point, this sense we had that
everything is temporary but we
got thrown together by some planetary alignment, for a minute
a night, a lifetime, and for a reason more than we could all agree on
this one band
and then it was over. My brother who is gone now said something stupid
got jumped, the other had to step up because that’s what brothers
do
and I moved
my blanket, so as to not be associated with that, which
pretty much sums up the decade; but until
we are finally all three again, I will
have this one thing.
This will be what we did.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 20, Issue 2.
Shannon Connor Winward is the author of the Elgin-award winning chapbook, Undoing Winter. Her writing has earned recognition in the Writers of the Future Contest and the Delaware Division of the Art Individual Artist Fellowship in literature.
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