Poetry

—after Wrecked Archive B-45HqDHfqp by Patty Paine I am inching along the Mackinac Bridge, passenger in a van.Through the frosted window, the sun is a yellow explosion,blown open, its blood a sulfur-yellow sheen that pools in thedistance on top of Lake Huron. The clack-clack-clack of thetires over the bridge’s steel grates sounds like one of my…

—after Wrecked Archive B-VAYKjKGqG image by Patty Paine Initially, I think the clown is in charge, because he is tweetingnothing but commands—no salutations, no jokes or puns orother clown-speak—but I am wrong. “I know who all of youpunks are!” he yells, shaking his fist, clutching a list that hethinks identifies the children, but he is wrong….

The world returns a bit on the fifthAlone Together day.                                            Amina’s teacher sends assignmentsover email.                    A friend calls with good news:Eileen got the Good Letter, the happy onefrom the school she wanted.                                        We return to the endless taskof freeing the front yard from weeds, and neighborscome by and stand at a distance, saying dubiously,“It looks all right,” or…

                                                  how much of the hand is fist my father asks—                                                        for him it’s halfwhat you’d expect—the tape’s temper                  between splint and split knuckles:symbol’s useless rigor;                                             the long ride home—                                                  for the boy with the torn lip,it’s half what you’d expect                                       bleaching blood off someripped…

maybe it’s too early for glow, slow asa cloud slung like what a soldier might carryhome—I’ll never understand whymy mother, for example, carrieda set of latrine tools, mosquito netting,a cat that wouldn’t leave her sideher infidelities, she carried thosetoo, like volcanic stonesthat which impossibly formed insidethe open mouth of mountains of whatone might choose to…

The orchard rippling in torrential windand apples themselves bob or drop, a swiftlapsarian plunge. Meal and moldering—in every core, trace cyanide and seed. Again, again, against the wind, my hatlike such small boat with sail taught, tugging.A lowtide mind, a rough dumb slosh-round bone.The satisfaction to be gained in weightof wanting, measured out by peck…

Would’ve said, did you see the calvesall copper and gold, cold leaning intotheir hulking mothers? Would’ve said, I grew up warm ina house with the wrong kind of bounty,sulking all over myself. Would’ve said room temperature affectionis the gelded way I try to keep youfrom disappointment. Trouble is I get myselfin trouble postcarding what should…

“We drank no milk for months, maybe a year,”my mother told me, “they poureda famine’s worth down the drains;all talk that summerwas of nuclear cloudsand acid rain.” Then came the crumbling of the Wall,and my father’s tears—my childish vision of himas the last communist,bathed in the blueglare of defeat, the revolution having been televisedand discardedas…

          Maybe what a river loves mostabout the banks that hold it—that appear to hold it—is their willingness or resignation to being          mere context for the river’s progressor retreat, depending. And maybe how the cattailsand reeds flourish there means they prefer          a river-love—how the river, running always away the way rivers tend to, stands as proof that reliabilitydoesn’t…