Poetry by Elizabeth Agans

     Heath Cajandig CC




Brooks Comes to the Motel 8

I picked up my old friend at the BART 
in Berkeley. The club on Gilman had been empty, 
no punk-rock kids in the plaid pants 
we used to wear. His bucket list realized, 

I took him to the Missouri Lounge,
my favorite East Bay dive. We laughed 
when I told him the locals called it The Misery.
Ready for something stiffer than beer, we headed 

to Napa, buying a bottle of Beam before he unpacked 
the Ziploc of Lorazepam, Lithium, Ambien, Klonopin.
His psych had weened him off the others. Our kiss
stinging of whiskey, he smelled as if he hadn’t changed 

soap since high school. In the morning, 
face-down, I heard the rattle in the motel bathroom 
before he came out in boxers. Flipping me on my back, 
he gave me a swig to cut the morning breath. 

I was drunk midday and crying months later. 
He never answered the phone. I woke 
on the couch to a call from a stranger: 
Ten years clean, and he fucking OD’d.





Elegy for Koko

              Her fingerprints
looked as ours do. Wrinkled, black,
smooth to tender touch, her malleable hands
                                disciplined
              to mirror the human condition.

              She never lost
a brother fighting the war
on drugs, never knew a true lotus-eater:
                               stumbling to
                a home no longer his own, dope-veiled,

                name forgotten.
Would she use her hands to sign,
You did everything you could? Do gorillas
                            understand
                “arbitrary”? I’d like to think that

                my eyes would say,
I could really use a hug;
and she’d rise, a gargantuan animal
                              Charis, arms
                ready to receive me, a mother

                and a sister.
O gentle, mute relative,
only living child—tell me I’ll survive this.
                            Show me, please,
                how to love without speaking a word.

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Sibling Rivalry

I could claim it started when the spoons 
started disappearing—or Mom’s Costco vodka.

Siblings make the best scapegoats.
I will miss that most. His nicotine patch 

from the hospital clogged the shower drain. 
I refused to share the same roof—and chose

to wake in a stranger’s room, my underwear 
by the door, one sock half on. At home, 

his favorite Vans without shoelaces started molding 
in the garage. I wish I believed that had I given

up the vodka, he could have given up the dope. 
Instead, I hold our mother—grateful for the flask 

I stashed beneath the pew before I stood up
for the eulogy, taking a swig as if she wouldn’t notice.





​Elizabeth Agans was born in a small town in Northern Illinois. She moved with her immediate family to Phoenix, Arizona, when she was six years old, and considers herself a child of the desert. She graduated magna cum laude from Arizona State University with Bachelor of Arts degrees in both English (Creative Writing) and Psychology, and received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Florida.
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