By Regan Green

For Phillip

My mother blows cigarette smoke
up the fireplace every time we stay at her brother’s
one-bed, one-bath, one-hole-in-the-television
where he shot the 9mm after too many fingers of Scotch
because “I’m not a Kevin Costner fan.”
My mother goes on again about my father
clanging his spoon in the cereal bowl.
“I don’t reckon I would’ve married Kimble
if I’d seen him eat a bowl of bran.”
I sip my three-day-cold cup of coffee
and sit on the mustard-plaid couch
where the pistol is tucked between two cushions.
When my father calls us home on the phone,
we walk out past busted glass:
a poster of Catherine the Great,
who took a slingshot to the head.
As we pass, my uncle asks how fast my fingernails grow.
I cut them once a week.
“Good,” he says. “Good.”

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Regan Green grew up in Tennessee and now lives in Baltimore. She is a junior lecturer in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and the Assistant Editor of the Birmingham Poetry Review. Other poems of hers have appeared or are forthcoming in The Missouri Review, Copper Nickel, The New Statesman, West Branch, Cimarron Review, and Best New Poets, among others.