Photoshopping My Sister’s Mugshot

I crop out the trailer and the splintered remains of the front door.
I crop out your name all over the news.
I crop out the sawed-off shotgun they found hidden in the yard.
I crop out the blood-vacant faces of every soul who was sold to.
I crop out their family’s hunted hearts.

I rotate the image until you are upside down, hanging
from the monkey bars, hollering my name,  Andrea, look what I can do!
I zoom in until there is no lighter beneath the spoon, just ice cream
dripping from your face, and me trying to teach you
how to blow out the candles the day you turned two years old,
your cheeks—pink balloons giggling away gravity.

I give more detail to the background. I pose you
beside our bloodline, our grandfather throwing his liver
through the kitchen window, our grandmother on her knees
sweeping up the glass. I zoom in to the pieces she didn’t find.
I find them in the sole of your shoes on your worst day of junior high.

There is a thin line between skewing the truth
and giving a panoramic view. I don’t know if I’m widening the lens
or just making an excuse when I say that you were a kid
the first time you used. You wanted blue hair
and a boyfriend, not a conscience

that wouldn’t have a good vein left, not an abscess
in the arm you would one day not hold your family with, not me
falling off the wagon of my unforgiveness,
running to the police station, begging them
to replace your mugshot with the negative,
your dark side in full light,

the filth-hungry scream in your body every time you tried
to get clean, the clinic that told our mother you would die
if she didn’t send you back out to the streets
to find the poison, to kill the bugs,
how I’d count your legs when you walked into the room.

How I still do. But that isn’t the right exposure.
Because you were also the kindest person I ever knew.
And that in itself has been its own dark room
considering  the ugliness is to scale,
considering our family tree

and how there isn’t a person who loves you
who isn’t dead on the branch.
How loving you less might have been the sweetest gift
I could have given my own life, but how that sweetness
would have rotted god’s teeth

when every Christmas morning you woke me at 4AM,
more excited for me to open my stocking
than you were to open yours.
How do I say that to a judge
and not sound insane?

How do I say the truth isn’t the right filter?
The truth knows nothing
of who you almost were, but I do.
I just click a button. I undo one tiny thing:
     and there you are.