By John Bargowski

It was only a steak knife their mother screamed at the cops
after Jimmy stabbed his twin who’d crawled into the hallway

from the apartment across from ours. I thought Joey was going
to die there, bleeding from the gut on the top step of the flight.

A few years older, they treated me like a kid brother, but led
a gang who stole freight from the Erie Lackawanna yard,

so the cops wanted to cuff both and take them downtown to book
and lock up. The judge gave the brothers a choice, so they enlisted

and were shipped off to the green hell we watched every night
on the news. Their mother, heart-ruined, moved away,

and we never heard from any of them again. Years later I walked
The Wall in DC, thinking about justice and what it takes to be a man

in America as I read down the names of the lost hoping to find
neither brother cut into the polished face of that sacred black granite,

unable to forget what brother could do to brother, how a boy’s blood
seeped into the grain of a worn marble step and left a stain

neighbors gathered around, like those bloody chips of martyr bone
we bowed and genuflected before on the holiest days.

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John Bargowski’s newest book is American Chestnut (Stephen F. Austin State University Press). His first book, Driving West on the Pulaski Skyway, was selected by Paul Mariani for the 2012 Bordighera Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the New Jersey Council on the Arts and the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest.