Forever Young

On my brother’s right bicep, tattoo ink read Forever Young before he was taken—brutally, nonsensically, when he was thirty years old. A permanence unimaginable but re-lived every day since March 27, 2019.

In the twenty-nine years I lived until that date, the death of a sibling was purely incomprehensible, a version of reality with no warning or preparation.

I grew up unconditionally believing my big brother was invincible, that our estrangement would eventually oscillate us back to each other when the time was “right.”

When that possibility evaporated, the only thing I knew to do was to write: as an act of comfort, an act of connection, an act of meaning-making that keeps him, our relationship, our futures, alive.

As today would’ve been BJ’s 36th birthday, I am returned to a poem that came to me in a dream: a voice insisting that the form of The Lord’s Prayer could nurture the very raw and real grief at losing him far too soon and keeping him forever young:

the sibling’s prayer

Our Brother, whose heart was resin

swallowed free by flame

cry wisdom from

cry still / be son in birth

as he was in question.

Give us this day (ours may be dead)

and forgive as our time lapses

as we outlive those who press ash against us

and feed us not into fixation

but consider us from people.

For time is the sting from

the power, and the story

for ever and ever

again.

—

Krystle May Statler (she/her) is a Black-multiracial artist living in Portland, OR and is the author of Prayer for Relief (2024). Her poems are featured in Poetry South, Epiphany Magazine, Fugue, Sixfold, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Poetry From Instructions, poetry.onl, 1455’s Movable Type, and Cultural Weekly. When she’s not artisting or designing books, Krystle can be found volunteering with The Grief House as the Fundraising Board Chair and Epiphany Magazine as a poetry reader, working as the Director of Operations at The Pathfinder Network, or nurturing life in Portland with her partner Kevin, their plant babies, and oodles of loved ones.

You can follow Krystle’s work online at krystlemaystatler.com and/or on Instagram at @2kay1. You can order her collection of poems, Prayer for Relief, here.