CODY

By Nova Venerable

My youngest brother was born

with my grandfather's nose

round like spools of thread,

my father's eyes and

my mother's genes.

 

He is 12 years old now and

I watch him play

Hungry Hungry Hippos,

see his body jitters like a wind up toy

and he screams like a happy crow

when he asks me to play with him.

 

He tries to learn the words

to the Scooby-doo song,

repeats the phrases my mother

and I say, and when I see him,

I wonder how could God know that

Diabetes peels 27 years of life

like dead skin.

Yet he still allows my brother

to have his fingers pricked

every day.

 

Why is it when I look

at him, I can see every needle

we've ever had to stick

his arms, legs, or stomach with

to keep him alive.

Sometimes five shots a day

isn't enough to fight juvenile diabetes.

 

I think

 

How could God bless him

with seizures and autism.

Why every time we rush him to the hospital

it could be my last day watching

him rewind on-demand

until his lips can curve

to form words

that aren't even his because my mother gave

him a broken X chromosome.

 

Today,

I will smile

As he learns to brush his teeth for the first time

or obsesses over his red pants and shirts,

I will laugh as he tries to learn sign language

to make up for tongue lost in Fragile-X

Syndrome

and I will accept his fake kisses

like disorders.

 

But I can't help but wonder

Can his brain still hold the times

I meshed his food up when he was 8

or changed his diapers at 7.

 

Will he miss me

when I am not there to run my fingers

through his hair like Pink Oil

when he wakes up from

ear tube surgeries or seizures.

 

Will he remember

how he slept in my bed every night

after mama left,

and I held him like an extra pillow.

Or when my arms were his restraints

when daddy said put him in middle

without seatbelt so he would be the

first to die in car accident.

Can he know how he found

a mother in big sister?

 

For now,

I will pray for him every night

that his kidneys will stop trying to fail on us,

that his blood sugar won't send him into

a coma.

I hope

that he won’t grow accustomed

to not pronouncing my name

when I go away to college, and I pray

I pray that his seizures won't kill

him before his diabetes does.