In school, we scrawl our names across blank white sheets. Take what we can of language, the soft lip of “L”, the bite of  “T”.  How “K”s are always breaking through our sentences.  My brother struggles, the words caught in the drain trap of his throat.  The stutter of his “B’s lingering in detention halls scented like pine sol and chalk dust. Yesterday, he broke another boy’s arm beneath the jungle gym.  Rocked in rage outside the nurse’s office for hours waiting for our mother, the thin clip of her heels on the tile echoing down the hall.  Soon, our bookbags fill with neatly scrawled notes and warnings.  I drop them one by one along the driveway, shove the rest into my pillow case.  If worse comes to worse, I will swallow them, folded tig...

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