This week’s poem, by Jules Vázquez, is a nuanced meditation on siblings and the changes that time brings to them. I love the rich imagery and deep feeling in this poem’s wise and aching portrait of a brother.

Vázquez, of South Portland, is a student at Baxter Academy for Technology and Science and a ballerina with Maine State Ballet. They wrote “Older Sister to Younger Brother” to showcase sibling bonds. They are an active environmentalist, having co-founded a municipal initiative to plant fruit trees in their community addressing two prevalent issues: food insecurity and climate change. They are a descendant of the Taino, the people of first contact with European settlers as they made their way across the Atlantic. The poem is the overall winner of The Telling Room’s 2023 Statewide Writing Contest.

Older Sister to Younger Brother

Recently my younger brother smells unfamiliar
He leaves with little to no warning
And returns with the lingering scent of grass stains, sweat,
And someone else’s living room on his sweater
He walks out quickly and clean
Returning with a mature, teenage kind of mud on his knees
In the beds of his fingernails rests paint and dirt

I can feel him tearing away from our mother
Ready to take on the vastness of his future
Without me or our cozy loft beds to return to
I wish I had missed him this much when he was small and moldable
As foolish as it sounds maybe he’d want to stay
Where blood was stronger than any friendship
And our whole world was our messy bedroom floor

– Jules Vázquez

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Megan Grumbling is a poet and writer who lives in Portland. DEEP WATER: Maine Poems is produced in collaboration with the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. “Older Sister to Younger Brother,” copyright 2023 by Jules Vázquez, was originally published in The Edge of the World (The Telling Room). It appears by permission of the author.