Our Other Sister for Ellen by Jeffrey Harrison

The cruelest thing I did to my younger sister
wasn't shooting a homemade blowdart into her knee,
where it dangled for a breathless second

before dropping off, but telling her we had
another, older sister who'd gone away.
What my motives were I can't recall: a whim,

or was it some need of mine to toy with loss,
to probe the ache of imaginary wounds?
But that first sentence was like a strand of DNA

that replicated itself in coiling lies
when my sister began asking her desperate questions.
I called our older sister Isabel

and gave her hazel eyes and long blonde hair.
I had her run away to California
where she took drugs and made hippie jewelry.

Before I knew it, she'd moved to Santa Fe
and opened a shop. She sent a postcard
every year or so, but she'd stopped calling.

I can still see my younger sister staring at me,
her eyes widening with desolation
then filling with tears. I can still remember

how thrilled and horrified I was
that something I'd just made up
had that kind of power, and I can still feel

the blowdart of remorse stabbing me in the heart
as I rushed to tell her none of it was true.
But it was too late. Our other sister

had already taken shape, and we could not
call her back from her life far away
or tell her how badly we missed her.

The moment I finished reading this poem, I immediately thought of "The Things They Carried". It was exactly the same in that the speaker tells her whole story only to say that the whole thing was made up. Except in the beginning it never said that it was fiction and I truly believed and fell for the story. Not that knowing it was fake made any difference because it still felt like it was real and it probably is real somewhere else. The one thing that makes this poem’s made up sister very real is all of the use of imagery. The speaker describes her fake sister, “I called our older sister Isabel and gave her hazel eyes and long blonde hair. I had her run away to California where she took drugs and made hippie jewelry. In my head, I can see exactly what the sister looks like. Also, a good use of simile is the line, “But that first sentence was like a strand of DNA that replicated itself in coiling lies”. This really works in the poem because the whole idea of the poem talks about the possibility of a sister and that would connect with DNA. It is became compared to lies and how once you start, you just keep going and one lie gets tangled up in another. I also thought that the poem gets kind of confusing at the end mixing between the truth and lie. It was also kind of weird how the stanzas and lines were arranged because a sentence wouldn’t be continued until the next stanza. I thought that this poem was okay, but I thought that t would be especially good for our class because we have just read “The Things They Carried”, which had similar themes (storytelling). I would recommend this poem to our class and it was pretty intriguing.