TRIALOGUE
Are you an only child?
An innocent, an ice-breaker (*at a boy’s birthday party*), expected to yield comity, jokes of birth-order friction, the runt’s acting antics, the oldest’s Herr Direktor-ness (*blue streamers, blue balloons, blue mesh party favors*).
Are you an only child?
I decide not to crack wise, not to ask, Is the pope . . .? because I am (*I was*) Catholic, raised on red, white & plaster blue (*blue, blue, blue*) pietà cake.
Are you an only child?
I consider singing my response, channeling Ethel Waters (#Am I blue, am I blue#), but I falter at the stage door, can’t break a leg I don’t possess. It’s not my job to be the dummy-star. My job’s behind the scenes, pulling puppet strings, rubber-cementing Icarus wings (#Oh he’s gone, he left me, am I blue#).
Are you an only child?
No.
The mutant brother came after me (*a wild blue nude*), piped onto white sheet cake from Ma’s pastry bag (*a royal frosting born to rule*), his sweet sugar-blood a wonder, like Giotto’s lapis sky.
Are you an only child?
Yes.
My brother’s name—cursed (*cursive*)—was wiped out, wiped over by a spatula of inlet ice. His sailboat cake came to rest in my mother’s arms, a (*drowned*) sailor boy blue in my mother’s arms.
Are you an only child?
Alone at the summit of every milestone (#Am I blue, am I blue#).
Are you an only child?
Yes, goddamn it. I am.
Maureen Kingston’s lives and works in eastern Nebraska. Her poems and prose have appeared or are forthcoming in Apocrypha and Abstractions, B O D Y, Gargoyle, Gravel, Gone Lawn, Hermeneutic Chaos Literary Journal, Misfitmagazine.net, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, So to Speak, Stoneboat, and Terrain.org. A few of her prose pieces have also been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart awards.
Cover Photo: Cless (https://www.flickr.com/photos/cless/)