My brother has taken me
                       to the house of his wife’s father
                                                        to live. It is in the next village,
                                                        and the road is a rough one.
               My feet bleed as always. The ache is unbearable.
                                       I can no longer pretend
                                               otherwise.

My brother strides ahead
,                        I am sure he believes
                                               I will catch up, that I am searching
       for his charity. For more than he can give.
Once we arrive,
       just before dusk,
                       I hear the hyenas begin to bark in the distance.
                               Their cries like a baby’s.
I hear my brother inside.
                He is shouting that his wife’s father
                               must take me in.
                       The man objects,
                                       does not want the shame of me inside
                       so near to him.
My brother insists, shouts that he took no dowry,
                that he should not have married his daughter for so little,
                that this is his debt.
She will not last long. Keep her out back or in the kitchen.
                       I am sure I hear him say this.
This is for you,
my brother says to him,
       this is your debt to bear.
My brother emerges from the darkness and walks away,
                his back disappears
                       down the road into the fading sun, lighter now
                                                        without my burden.
                I will not touch anything, Uncle,
                                               I murmur with my eyes cast down
                                into the dust
        which glows orange for a moment in the dying light
               and then fades to purple.
I am quiet.
        I bite my lips.
               I feel his eyes on me.
While I stand, my own weight slumps my shoulders,
                       causes my knees to shake
                                                          and buckle.
Please Uncle, please may I go around back and sit?
The walk was a long one and my feet.

                                No, he says, you will come inside.
                       My daughter’s bed is for you,
               but you will wash the sheets yourself.

–E. K. Mortenson,
The Fifteenth Station (2012)
Accents Publishing

More from The Fifteenth Station and E. K. Mortenson:

• “The Second Station”
• “The First Station”
• E. K. Mortenson’s Lexington Poetry Month submissions
• Press for E. K. Mortenson’s The Fifteenth Station

Cover image "Oskarżony" by Odilon Redon.

E. K. Mortenson is the author of a chapbook, Dreamer or the Dream (Last Automat Press, 2010), and a full-length collection, What Wakes Us (Cervena Barva Press, forthcoming). His work also appears in both print and online journals and anthologies. He was the 2008 recipient of the Leslie Leeds Poetry Prize and is poetry editor at Kugelmass: A Journal of Literary Humor. He writes and teaches in Pennsylvania where he lives with his wife and two children.