Breaching

 3/20/2026 (c)

 

Aunt Beulah was so pleased Ronny came home alive.

For three summers he sat cross-legged in the front yard,

Pea-green jacket, smoking home-grown, laughing—

which was strange. No one did happy in our family.

 

He finally manned up, got some shit job in Seattle

scrubbing toilets and patching drywall.

 

Vietnam wasted Ronny, was all dad said, and once

Ronny is a waste.

 

I never heard if Ronny had killed, or crept

through underbrush in a scraggly formation

of camouflaged boys—

onslaught of torrential rain, shrapnel.

I never even asked if he had a nickname.

like Injun, or Tonasket.

 

Nam and eventually Ronny became two more topics

we did not breach at the dinner table.

Mealtime was silence and hate shoveled down

with slabs of beef broiled into charcoal pucks.

On a good day, Dad ranted about gold diggers,  

racially inferiors, that Management Prick.

It was not our place to join in, but to take it in.

 

At night Mom and Dad drank Jim Beam and fought,

their resentment worming through the oil duct into my room. 

By my teens it became all about me—my deliberate mediocrity,

the marijuana in my sock drawer, my slutty influence on my sister.

I was the source of all unhappiness in that house.

 

Boarding school—good money after bad.

They wanted instead to sign me up, ship me out,

slap a devil’s piano in my hand—

 

They hoped I’d die.

 

Because Ronny left it—

because his name, my name

patched above the heart, confirming me on a short list

of combat survivors, I slept in Ronny’s coat,

 

my bedroom a triage where I bandaged wounds

peppering my frail psyche.

 

When I reached the point of no return and little fight left

I undertook a three-month hunger strike—

a siege as inviolable to me as it was invisible to them.

 

And when my sister wanted Ronny’s coat, she took it

and I let her have it.