Lisa Lewis
Winter 2025 | Poetry
Secret Siblings Don’t Know
His legitimate children deserve their privacy.
I stalk them online. I have not called.
But I would peer through a window darkly.
To watch my half-sister package the plaid bags
she sells to brides-to-be. Or my half-brother
golfing. He’s peaceful on the putting green.
The shorn grass nestles around his soles.
Their world is in predictable order, like plaid,
and I am not in mind or needed
on course, coughing up harsh about daddy
or how fast he drove my mother to the party
where, it turned out, no one showed up
but them. Some undergrad’s rented Colonial,
empty, someone with wealthy parents like him.
His own place, maybe. By the time she told me
she’d forgotten if she knew. Charlottesville.
University town, dance band piano. If she had walked
away—why didn’t she walk away? See,
I can still make it her fault. Anyone could.
But I want us to have to look at Buddy’s face
today, Buddy Lewis, she named me for him,
but no signature on the certificate.
Let’s measure the big forehead with the cowlick.
More simply, measure mine. Oh, little sister.
Show me your forehead. Show me what you’ve got.
Oh, my little brother. I dream you small,
I hand you toothpick clubs and a matchbox cart
and push you around on my childhood bedspread,
over the hills and whoosh down in the creases,
abandoned valleys, I look more like daddy
than you do! And I don’t even belong.
What do we expect? They want me to abandon
the shores of luxurious Sarasota. Their mother
is as dead as mine and now daddy is too
and they fear I might expect someone to write
a check. I expect them to send me packing,
to return to their gentle pastimes,
they will need a bridal shower or a few rounds
to heal. I am dreaming myself onto the bench
where she met him, I am rising to stand, I am closing
the lid of the piano she sold to help me in grad school,
the babbling baby grand she would not play.
I am so much taller now, I’m starting to hum
this melody we already know. The song of shame,
of stories neighbors tell.
What do you have to say, friends?
What have you found out now?
Lisa Lewis has published eight collections of poetry, most recently Taxonomy of the Missing (WordWorks, 2018) and a chapbook, The Borrowing Days (Emrys, 2021). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in New Letters, Puerto del Sol, Cream City Review, North American Review, Agni, Cloudbank, and elsewhere. She teaches in the creative writing program at Oklahoma State University and serves as editor-in-chief of the Cimarron Review.