Sirens crescendo, decrescendo on the street–ears feel stuffed with sound, crowding out the spaces for other noise to come in or for silence to sit for just one minute.

It is not a siren from the sea tempting me to forget home because home is the siren. It is my prized, idealized seashore with sounds of nephews laughing, my mom’s giggle and mine in-sync colliding, fireplace on and burning and stomach churning because mirth feels drowned out by all the sirens.

Warning alerts from a town that raised me–they hold megaphones to signal, to sign, to remind that there are sirens. They call out in love but it makes this cacophony louder.

We begged you not to marry him, watched him bury his head when he met our father, watched you turn from something you dreamed of, prayed for farther and farther because you could never hear the sirens.

And they ring, but I won’t sing any told-you-so-words because I will be a clanging gong, feigning love but just joining in with all this noise.

When we lay on the floor, we are still those two bowl-cut babies making songs up, writing in crayon, naming our band and banding together so that any sirens that played stayed in the fringes; always hinging into our world, we sat by, starry-eyed and made up other lands to escape to.

The sirens keep us awake, but they make you weep,

but you and I will find ways to pretend their asleep; we’ll laugh a little to dull it, go back to old worlds and songs and starry-eyes till all this noise crashes by.

Romping of little feet,

little gasp and screech when I come through the door;

my name never sounds as sweet as from your mouths.

Trains strewn on the carpet,

we whisper stories together of magic toyboxes

until you’re ready for another game.

Sideways glances when I ask you a question–

I laugh because you know so many things before you’re told.

You know more than I wish you knew sometimes.

You see things in ways we cannot see.

It is precious; but other times, it unnerves me.

I wish you to be selectively blind,

to have ears that stop up when pain comes to them,

for bright colors to replace dark spaces,

for shadows to blur to light.

I wish you to be free of these fights that are part of being human .

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