Left Behind

by Julie Weiss

Max Muselmann

If it had all been a bad dream and you had barreled through the front door, ravenous after soccer practice, homework sheets spilling

out of your backpack, you wouldn’t have recognized me: eyes the shade of storm clouds, a torrent caving my face. I was proof that a man

could grow as thin as the streak that trails a bird in flight. You would have said: dad, why haven’t you washed your shirt?

There are ways to eradicate stains but I wanted to wear your blood so that I might collapse, intoxicated by your smell, stifle

the image of your body, motionless among the dead. I fantasized about ghosts, how you’d enliven our walls with your shadow moves. How you’d raise the hairs

on the back of your mother’s neck, as if pulling one of your pranks, the kind that always got you grounded but made us chuckle in private.

During the day, we keep it together. Nights my mind shudders under the knife-edge of memory. You step onto the stage of my nightmares

dressed in blood, launch your spirit body into a leap, my leap, the leap that didn’t carry me far enough to land in front of the shots. You leap in slow motion

as if mocking my failed attempt at heroics. Reeling, I roar into the void: I never wanted to be a superhero! I only wanted to chest the bullets that cheated you

out of life. I came up short, son. For a time, I thought we’d lost our only child, but that was before I learned to see you in a gust of wind, tousling my hair.

Before I learned to trace your expressions in swirls of sunrise. Before I learned to recognize your wave in the wings of a butterfly, flitting among daisies

outside your bedroom. All those colors gathered in your arms, I think you might splash them against the window, startle me out of my stupor.

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Julie Weiss received her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from SJSU. She’s a 45-year-old ex-pat from Foster City, California, who moved to Spain in 2001 and never looked back. She works as a telephone English teacher from her home in Guadalajara, Spain, where she lives with her wife, 4-year-old daughter, and 1-year-old son. Her work appears in Lavender Review, Sinister Wisdom, The American Journal of Poetry, Santa Clara Review, Sky Island Journal, and Random Sample Review, among others. You can find her on Twitter @colourofpoetry or on her website at https://julieweiss2001.wordpress.com/