Fried Green Tomatoes

I’ll never miss my brother
no matter how long he’s gone.
But I’ll always miss my mother
even when she’s next to me.

He’s always present
in the form of my mother’s paces
and my father’s endless phone calls.
He’s here in my broken toothbrushes
his broken bed frame
the bottles of pills
and the empty house I come home to.

He lays in a hospital bed
his oxygen comes from a mask
My oxygen abandoned me the minute
my mother and I left sunny Charleston
and I couldn’t keep pretending I
was an only child.

I miss the 70 degree nights
of fried green tomatoes at Magnolia’s.
Where we’d stroll through the lamp lit
sidewalks, wine drunk and laughing
about her losing her wallet
and the bartender who wouldn’t serve me,
For shame was not something we could feel
anymore

Now I sit in my empty kitchen
drinking Bourbon trying to conjure
the same blissful shamelessness I’d
felt at 11pm on the streets of Charleston.
I can’t find my oxygen at the bottom of
a bottle but I can find the peaceful
apathy.

The kind you find at the bottom of a lake
when the panic subsides and you stop
trying to swim.

There is no sanctuary from shame
as I roam the beautiful prison I call home.
I think of my sick brother and my
broken mother and can only muster sympathy
for myself.
I will never know life without my brother
who I always fail to pity.
His helplessness makes him ever present
and inescapable like a God.
And I’m selfish, and bitter and damned.

Holly Smyth is an 18-year-old aspiring writer from Fairfield, CT. She is a first-year student at Lafayette College and is studying International Affairs. She writes in all genres but has a focus in poetry, with common themes revolving around love and relationships, familial tensions, mental health, and women's issues.