![]() Dustin Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud (BOA Editions, 2022), Millennial Roost (C&R Press, 2018), and A Family Is a House (C&R Press, 2019). He makes gif poems that he posts on Facebook and Twitter and adapts them into short films that you can view on his Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy0BS0iNlLm_l1bAqqR0OBQ?view_as=subscriber My Brother Outside the House in Hell
I fell asleep after I told myself I’d watch him. What convinced him there was relief to find in the flames outside when he’d seen already what I showed him? I woke to his smell. The heat of the door and his turning of its knob burned to the bone before he could get it open. His flesh fell uneven and beaded on the hardwood. The circling flames blew through. A plume of hellfire brushed me back from where I’d been standing, but I rushed to the one window to track him. I watched my brother running, the flames in a cruel attachment to his skin, his arms flailing. He ran with his mouth open, screaming, as everyone outside was, and crying, though no tears, no intimate evidence of conditions. The fire took his face, and for his black skull, all I could think was how we’d once been told that deep down the two of us were identical, beyond the arrangement of muscle and its appearance. I knew the house would never let my brother back in, but even waking from the dream, I knew I wouldn’t wake from any decision to leave us separated, leaving everything in the moment our eyes opened to unite us, but even migrating to the door, I couldn’t open it. Between burns on my hands and anticipating the pain of the outside, I failed each time. I walked back to the window, watched my brother disappear. I was left alone in the house, my brother finally let to roam. And though I knew under those terms we’d never see each other again, I knew we found a home outside the sea of each other.
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