Machines

if I never learned the earth was spinning;
that there was no bottom and there was no top;
that light from stars I could see left years before I could see the light;
that so many stars could now be gone;
that the sun, one day, as well, would be;
that this wasn’t the kind of thing to overthink;
and if I never learned to overthink;
if I could switch thoughts off before they started to spin;
take that first celebrity suicide;
I mean the first one in our lives;
he wrote a note then shot himself;
we weren’t supposed to hear this;
they were whispering so we wouldn’t;
it was our mother and a neighbor from down the street;
we called her aunt, but she wasn’t our aunt;
she was these kids’ mother, and we hated her kids;
we hated her more;
she made our mother act so dumb;
she made her drink too much;
they were drinking, this day, a bottle of orange liqueur;
the bottom of the bottle was shaped like an orange;
it was our fake aunt’s bottle she brought over;
it was too early to be drinking liqueur;
our fake aunt was often drunk in the day;
she was divorced, and divorce, back then, meant something;
it meant fucked-up kids and it meant your reputation;
it meant our fake aunt fell down, drunk, on her way home from our house;
but that was a different day;
that day, she fell over the hose the help had left in a bunch on the lawn;
we heard her scream, and it could have been from anything, a scream like that;
my brother and I ran outside to see;
our fake aunt was facedown in the grass;
we didn’t want to touch her, so we waited for her to get to her knees, figure it out;
our mother didn’t drink in the day unless our fake aunt was at our house;
our mother was weak around other women, and we’d always known she was weak;
now here she was, pretending not to be drunk, pretending an interest in us we knew was just pretend;
then, Pow, our fake aunt said and stood and shaped her hand like a gun at her head;
What, we said;
our mother said, Nothing;
to our fake aunt, she said, The kids;
our mother never once thought before she spoke;
she always ruined it all;
my brother said, Why the gun;
Tell me, he said;
I said, Tell me;
there was no reason to keep a secret from us;
we knew too much already;
there were bigger things than the things they kept a secret;
like all of space, for instance;
like all...