Alicia Mountain

COWBOY

My brother looks like me except he is my brother
My brother wears my clothes
My brother doesn’t do much laundry
He doesn’t look anyone in the eye
My brother wears my shame sometimes
He washes dishes for me
My brother eats like he doesn’t know when he will eat again
My brother stays up late

I asked my brother about prayer and he showed me
Rolled out his yoga mat and took off all his clothes
Became a child in child’s pose
Turned his palms up
Are you asking or offering? I asked
He said they’re the same thing to me

I got a tattoo of my brother as a cowboy on my ribs
When anyone sees it they say that’s you
My brother is the brother part of me I didn’t get to be
He disappears when the rest come around
We go into the bathroom together or into the coat closet
We look into each other’s eyes and get chest to chest and press
Then my brother ghosts back into me like passing through a wall

ALICIA MOUNTAIN is the author of Four in Hand (BOA, 2023). Her debut collection, High Ground Coward (Iowa, 2018), won the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her work has been published by the Academy of American Poets, American Poetry Review, The Nation, and Poetry Northwest. Mountain serves on the board of Foglifter, a LGBTQIA+ journal in the Bay Area, and is in psychoanalytic training at the National Institute for the Psychotherapies. She lives in New York City and teaches at the Writer’s Foundry MFA program at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn.