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Road Trip
An old trailer off
Highway 65 wakes up
the part of you that’s
filled with junk metal.
And windows so grimy
you can’t imagine seeing
out of them. And you’re back
in that other life.
Not that you lived in a trailer
by the side of a highway.
That’s not the way
the mind works. It just lifts
and deposits, simple as that.
Lifts and deposits you into
a gray mass of sheet metal
and filthy windows as playfully
as if you had agreed to play.
And thank God it does that
because you might not
otherwise go to that yard,
or even notice it.
When I First Fooled God/St. Barnabas Hospital
I promised God when I was seven
that if I could just go home
I would not complain again.
That’s all I thought I wanted.
So it could have been
the very first night back
that I knelt at my bedroom window
like a skinny grasshopper,
looking out into the dark.
I was coming to God as an animal now,
my message sent as the smallest
creature might send it, every muscle
leaping to be out somewhere
in a lush place. But I didn’t
ask God for that place—
I told the God in the dark sky
that I didn’t believe. And I thought
God told me it didn’t matter—I would still
remember my promise, and
everything I wanted would feel
like danger to me, and everything
I thought I wanted I might actually get.
[selected as runner-up for the Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize, Water-Stone
Review, Fall 2012, judge: Alberto Rios]
One of the Stories
It’s one of the stories my daughter keeps
for him. It has to do with his seventh
birthday, when he and his mom,
outside of town in their trailer,
hung balloons and baked a cake
and invited his whole second-
grade class to the only party
he ever had. And no one came.
She leans up against this story
and it gives her a place to spill
sadness. The story that lures me
like that involves her, as she
lies on the carpet rolling her head
back and forth crying I think too much,
I think too much.
There’s no catching up with these stories.
Isn’t he now a man who disappoints,
though once his joy was pressed dry
by disappointment?
Isn’t it all true?
Farmhouse
Okay I’ll tell you about that place
I was there because they were friends of his
and he was my big brother He lived on his own
and he wanted to show off The girl was fifteen at
the most Just younger than me and they all
lived in an abandoned farmhouse There was a
basement but no stairs going down to it Just
an open hole and someone’s little kids played in the kitchen
by that long fall And worse the girl lived with
her uncle and was his girlfriend We accepted
that I guess She sang better than Joni Mitchell or
Loretta Lynn or her own mom who looked like
a girl too Going around the room was one
joint after another A great big bottle of wine lots
of Grain Belt I watched her sing sometimes nodding
my head In that place with no way home except my brother
I had no mind of my own I watched someone soak her foot
in epsom salts A nail went through it I had no body of my
own either So when I see anyone go too far that
farmhouse is really what enters my mind settling deep
like a stone in mud My son whom I would pull from
quicksand and send almost anything sinking beneath him to
do it tells me about the crackhead he knows who sings scat
and was burnt in two months sometimes has a week where
he’s clean and doesn’t have pee all over his pants and
talks normal and then he’s back on it again
And Tyler the heroin addict and How do you
know these guys I ask my son He’s a squatter
I don’t know he says And I think of that place that hole
and those little kids and I want to say go backwards Run
away from that stuff But that’s not it That’s not
what I want to say I want to say Hang onto your
body I want to say Listen I want to say
I’ve heard enough.
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