2026 Competition

Siblings

All summer, feral and wishing to be boys,

bright with grime, wearing the woods like a ghillie.

We stripped sticks for bows, split flint,

sometimes fingers, with a smell like gunpowder.

Thrilled at sparks. They hardly flew at all, those arrows,

but we teased ink from berries alright,

misspelled ‘caution’ but getting ‘danger’ right.

That August, a girl was dragged into the trees

and raped, though we didn’t know what rape was,

only some man in a long coat, his thing out.

So, we booby-trapped our camp, just like Home Alone,

with fragile tripwires, rocks on string, a narrow trench

filled with broken sticks, points erect.

It was the last summer we played like that,

our combined treasures still buried now

in a plastic takeaway container. I think I could find it,

unearth those cereal-box figurines, seeing as we

shed our names, continents, but never quite each other.