BY ANDI TALARICO
Dear Jesse,
Happy 29th birthday in prison.
Dear Jesse,
I write this to you on your 29th birthday, which you’ll spend in prison.
Dear Jesse,
Happy Birthday, little brother, in prison.
Dear Jesse,
I meant half-brother. It matters.
Dear Jesse-
I don’t know how to write this letter. I don’t know how to do it.
Dear Jesse-
I’m sorry.
Dear Jesse,
I hate you.
Dear Jesse,
Her life mattered too.
Dear Jesse,
She was 23. She was 23 and you gunned her down over $60 worth of shit heroin. You did that.
Dear Jesse,
I hate you.
I hate you for making this family the wrong kind of poor. A snarl of statistics on rural poverty, a tragedy so common, so small, you’re not even a footnote in the 10 page New Yorker article on the opioid epidemic. I read it on the train to work. I read a clinical article on the pharmaceutical industry on the train to work in New York City. In my ears, airpods scanned the highs and lows of Chet Baker. The most distant mirror.
I read about your world at arm’s length. I thought of you saying-
“Fuck you, Andrea, and your perfect fucking life.”
“Give me 20 bucks, Andrea. I know you got it.”
“You’re not better than me.”
I’m not.
I am.
I’m not.
Dear Jesse,
I watch your arrest on the news. They show a picture of the dead girl on the bottom right corner of the screen. The reporter asks you what you have to say for yourself. You snarl,
“Get out of my face.”
I am.
I’m not.
I am.
Dear Jesse,
I know you’re no broken branch on a perfect family tree. Not even a tree, really, a snarl of a thorny bush, really, a tangle of blighted limbs, really. To call anything that happens here cyclical is to bestow too much order upon it. Really.
Dear Jesse,
We have different fathers. Yours was not a great man. Let’s say that. Let’s remember that when his chemicals crested or cratered, the wrong pill, say, the wrong smoke, the wrong spike, the wrong sniff, it usually ended badly for our mother. You’re too young to remember her broken arm. You’re too young to remember when he still drank. I watched him pour a beer over her head during an argument. I watched her hurl a glass ashtray at his face and almost blind him.
Dear Jesse,
I remember.
Dear Jesse,
I was seven when you were born, barely not a baby myself. I learned how to love a new human through you, your bright brown eyes reflecting everything you saw around you, new and holy through you. You, on my hip. You, taking the bottle in my hand. You, a small version of me. You, making a big sister of me. You. You named me DeeDee. I named you Young King. I wanted to give the world to you. You.
Dear Jesse,
Our mother joked that she named you for Jesse James. She always liked the bad boys best.
Dear Jesse,
Your father was one of the worst.
Dear Jesse,
I know it was right after he died that you spent your first bout in Juvie. What were you, twelve? Thirteen?
Dear Jesse,
I know that you chose violence over grief, or violence through grief, or violence as grief, or that maybe violence is a grief, or that maybe grief is a violence in that it can murder the person bearing the weight of it.
Jesse,
It is not lost on me that your drug of choice is a pain-killer.
Dear Jesse,
I love you.
Dear Jesse,
I hate you.
Jesse,
That poor woman. I grieve for her life.
Jesse,
You poor child. I grieve for yours as well.
Jesse,
The letter I send will say just this,
“Dear Jesse,
Try to have a happy birthday. You know I’m here if you need books. Love you, little brother.”
Andi Talarico is a Brooklyn-based writer and reader. She’s the curator and host of At the Inkwell NYC, an international reading series whose New York branch meets at KGB Bar. She's taught poetry in classrooms as a rostered artist, and acted as coach and judge for Poetry Out Loud. In 2003, Paperkite Press published her chapbook, Spinning with the Tornado, and Swandive Publishing included her in the 2014 anthology, Everyday Escape Poems. She also penned a literary arts column for Electric City magazine for several years. When she’s not working with stationery company Baron Fig, she can be found reading tarot cards, supporting independent bookstores, and searching for the best oyster Happy Hour in NYC.