Sixfold Poetry Summer 2015, Page 2

Marianne S. Johnson

  Nine Feet East of Roadway Edge: One Shoe

  The police report is staccato lines, check-the-box,

  fill-in-the-blanks, measured. The mother hands it to me

  over my desk with the files of minor tragedies, survivable

  accidents piled between us. I knew she was coming,

  so I put on a suit; she will want to see me as a lawyer,

  not another mother of another nine-year old son.

  I tell her that I will obtain the forty-one photos of the scene,

  his small torso on the street, the ribs she tickled, his dark

  hair unkempt. She doesn’t have to see them, won’t see

  the red trails darkening the dirt shoulder, point of impact,

  point of rest, in the school zone. The children knew

  where to place the roadside flowers. Bright balloons

  would leak like lungs, unlike a heart exploding

  in a chest, a brain bursting in a skull, a breast

  engorged and spurting with a baby’s cry.

  I fixate on his shoe: sole up, black as asphalt

  with day-glo green laces, how she bought them

  wondering if he would wear them out before

  he outgrew them, how his feet slipped into

  and then out of them as loose as he slipped

  out of her and into breath of air.

  Tortious

  Last night I dreamt of butterflies

  fluttering soft upon the small boy’s face,

  his temple of asphalt wounds, blood

  ponds, reflected in their stained glass wings.

  The sound of my pounding heart

  frightened them off, they rose

  and strained against the gravity

  of his hematoma chest. He was not mine.

  A morgue shudder, my nightmare

  hand clutched the bone cold table.

  Monarchs circled above us, when my own

  son’s face morphed onto the broken body

  as the head turned to me, pulpy lips mouthing

  “It didn’t hurt, mother.” A scream

  jackknifed my lungs, choked

  on the gallows weight of night.

  Tort, torture, contorted

  tonight, I am wakeful very late

  and watch my sleeping son in his bed.

  His twelve-year old body thrashes itself awake,

  I cocoon into the small of his small back,

  the room fogged into a chrysalis. “Mom, I’m fine,”

  he mutters annoyed, but I stay a little,

  listening for his eyelashes to wing off in flight.

  Lessons for the Week

  Tuesday night, my son studied

  a Holocaust survivor, scrolling

  the shrinking roll of Jewish names,

  battered sepias of children before

  their internments and tormentors.

  Six million Jews were murdered,

  and at least one million of them were children.

  Yes, he is learning that.

  My eighth-grader came home to news

  of the Newtown 20, just nine days

  left on the Christmas calendar.

  Eyes stuck stoic in front of the TV

  he asked if they were all first-graders

  “like my buddy at school.” Yes, I said,

  like your buddy at school. “I helped

  him get his lunch today,” he stuttered

  and I imagined the weed-stalk of him

  bending low to hug his assigned bud,

  look his little guy in the eye

  and rustle him off into the wind.

  Yes, he could do that.

  Weekend deep in the terror of it,

  I woke up screaming—his face

  pasted onto dead children,

  a young body in the morgue

  thrown by a speeding car, swollen

  with the violence of their embrace.

  I fled the hysterical dark to his room,

  his voice scraped awake with “what?”

  but nothing escaped my throat.

  In the morning whirl, he asked about

  “that boy who skated” into the road

  and I begged him never to do such things.

  There was oatmeal and apple slices

  in his promise. Yes, he could do that.

  Wrongful Death

  1. Plaintiff

  I can’t move. An oddity on display.

  They stare at me, a flightless bird-

  creature from some obscure island

  beyond any imaginable map’s edge,

  I have buried a child, wretched thing

  that I am. My boy-egg broken on asphalt,

  a boy-petal crushed in the road,

  boy-flesh of my flesh ravaged by metal

  rubber and gravel. The boy-less mother—

  if I exist, then fate is indeed cruel

  and unusual. The unthinkable happens,

  savages the earth; it vultures ‘round school

  grounds and street corners. I’m the proof.

  They can’t take their eyes off me.

  Waiting for me to puddle onto

  the floor at the mention

  of his name. I won’t move.

  If I move, the monsters under the bed

  will know I am there, again. The monstrous

  must account, the monstrous must

  answer for this dark.

  2. Attorney

  I cannot smile. Retained woman,

  smartly dressed at counsel table

  made up face, disaster on my lips. No better

  than the Barbie doll anchor serving up

  the deaths of 135 in a plane

  crash, live at five. I must speak

  the unspeakable. A suit who filed suit

  for the death of the boy. They hate me

  already. How dare I ask

  the value of a nine-year old in a grave?

  Calculate the number of goodnight kisses

  in a boy, compound the interest on his

  soccer moves, the grades and grandchildren

  left unearned. Price tag a love lost.

  How can I? It is all I can do. He could have

  been mine. He could have been theirs.

  3. Juror

  College is out, summer animates the halls.

  This room, larger than I pictured, filled

  with suited players, not the small,

  swarmy stage of mockingbirds and

  southern winds. The black robe

  in charge crows to the lawyers

  from his perch, captives in paper chains.

  My name called and assigned

  to seat number six, next to Five,

  who looks like my Gramps when he

  folds his arms. His children were grown

  by a stay-at-home mom; they still breathe

  and pay taxes and sweat in their beds.

  What does Five know about single mom?

  She could be a space alien to Five.

  His bowels growl and it is still only morning.

  Will I hear her womb scream, from here?

  4. Attorney

  Twelve faces lined up in an egg carton,

  on the edge of breaking open in my hands

  over the rail between the facts and their vanilla

  safe, engineered, routine. They are about

  to catch a nightmare, as if it could breed

  like a germ I breathe on them. Tilt back

  in the rack, as far as they can. Except for

  number Six, whose body shifts toward me

  and the horror I parade back and forth. She

  wants to grab my hand as in a movie theater

  when the music tenses just as blackbirds

  murder on to a screen.

  5. Juror

  Mom shoulders into a fetal curl,

  penitent as a nun. Only a handful

  of
years older than me, looking

  a hundred years past dead.

  She was me when she had him,

  his tiny fingernails like fish scales

  from pre-natal stew. A photo of his shoe

  in the road, laces loose. He put them on that day

  without a clue. His ten fingers, plump

  as caterpillars gnawing a dirty palm,

  would die within reach of her.

  Her own hands weep in her lap.

  A ruffle of crow wings. A bowel grumbles.

  A throat clearing. A womb screaming.

  6. Plaintiff

  My ears are bleeding.

  My eyes are blood-black.

  My mouth is pooled black.

  My uterus is pulpy road kill on the exhibit table.

  Their eyes autopsy our lives—

  every detail stitched with

  womb memories, cut anew as a tomb

  freshly hewn. Atrial muscle, a peeled

  and sliced blood orange, pinned

  to an emptied breast. They stare—

  my hands bleed inconsolable.

  7. Attorney

  “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,”

  8. Juror

  There are 100 trillion cells

  in the human body, and one quarter

  are red blood cells. I learned that

  in biology class. Do her cells remember

  his, laced in the membrane of red

  between them? Her every breath sends

  a purge of atoms that mourn him. The vein

  in her neck is pounding out a dirge.

  9. Attorney

  “From the forensic, can you track the

  boy’s path until he was struck by the car?”

  My ears are ringing.

  Mouth of desert. Number Six

  cradles her flat belly and rocks.

  Photos swirl his youth, his eyes eclipse

  in black. He could have been—

  no, he was

  ours.

  Anthony

  was never ten. He was never a senior

  with a license in his pocket, never

  a rapper or a bagger at the market,

  or a lover stockbroker with chardonnay

  leather satchel. Dark eyes never saw

  more than nine, once caught red-

  handed with skateboard

  on the roof of the school

  by the super, after his homies

  flew the coop. Call your mother, son,

  to pick up you and your board, the dude

  said. Still only nine at springtime,

  black Vans and a natural tan, father-

  less and stepfather-less again,

  after mom came off a twelve hour

  shift into a smackaround.

  Anthony calmed his sisters, listened

  to the walls heaving, his black hair

  sweating like a highway in the desert.

  When I grow up, he thought, when I grow

  up. Anthony did not see May break

  into that April, never saw a girl’s blouse

  unbutton in the backseat throes,

  never saw the silver sedan blow

  through the school zone as he darted out—

  Kate Magill

  Nest Study #1

  The nest in dead branches is not an empty nest:

  rimed over with questions and brimful with winter,

  unperturbed by the wind that threatens to whisk it

  from the place where it was made, needed, abandoned.

  A room woven of leavings—red thread and tinsel—

  bound up for a season and slowly dispersing.

  To come home each day to such finely tuned debris:

  I’m sure now, here, that I could make do as a bird.

  To slip between currents and make of wind a home,

  knowing every dwelling is weightless as your bones

  and temporary as the blood that stirs about

  your labyrinth, the headlong chambers of your heart.

  Nest Study #2

  We built it of bottle caps and rusted barbed wire,

  of green plastic army men abandoned on the beach.

  We built it of sanded down seaglass, of seedpods,

  of cow skulls revealed when the snow melts, pure and bleached.

  We scavenged five-cent cans from culverts,

  traded cap erasers for small stones,

  caught frogs and fed them the right kinds of flies,

  named them after villains, after heroes.

  Maybe somewhere we saved up all the chewed stems

  of the leaves of grass we plucked, sucking for sweet,

  the buttercups we shone on chins,

  the dandelions we unleashed,

  propelled by whistles, pirouettes,

  as we learned how our bodies,

  their hither-thither breath and limbs,

  could be the origin of wind.

  Whatever’s Left

  You need to stop reading.

  The languor of someone else’s structures

  holds nothing, offers all the sustenance

  of stone,

  of floating.

  You need to stop reading.

  You need to change your gaze.

  The words of others are not made

  to hold your days,

  the heat and strife and anguish

  of your living living body.

  Your body.

  You are made

  to contain and expel,

  to hold and to tell

  to go forth and put forth and hold forth and hold worth—

  How to measure the worth

  of a moment snagged from time?

  How to measure the worth

  of the hook, of the line?

  It may all come to nothing.

  How to frame the invisible,

  make its elegance plain.

  It will all come to nothing.

  You need to change the gaze.

  Double vision—not enough.

  A singular vision—not enough.

  Is it enough after dark

  to feel the heat of the day

  come up through the soles of your feet?

  Enough to taste

  the heart of the matter,

  tongue its bloody pulp?

  Enough to say you’ve tasted it?

  Someday the heat will drain

  from all the promises you’ve made

  and whatever’s left

  will be printed

  on someone else’s page.

  Happy Here

  an onion

  an avocado overripe

  stray garlic skins

  and coffee grounds

  a lingering smell of bleach

  so deep in your skin

  you can’t scrub it out

  sooty footprint from the peppermill

  sweaters half knit with dog hair

  fly shit speckling the windowsills

  the grit of a year’s worth of days

  a day’s worth of years

  greying itself into your bare feet

  a promise you’d be happy here

  white mug half black with stale coffee

  not enough room in a single sentence

  for happy and here to coexist

  here the cupboard full of nothing

  where the mice like to shit

  and over there the sack of rice

  fifty dollars worth of rice

  dribbling onto the floor

  mingling with dead skin and flies’ wings

  the little bastards chewed a hole in it

  keep coming back for more

  failing fluorescence overhead

  broken clock blinking an impossible time

  and you struggling to remember the shape of the world

  before the matter of yours and mine

  sour milk smell from the fridge

  cream you never bother with


  cream you keep for guests you never have

  do you long for the days

  the fugitive days

  the promiseless places

  empty cities

  cities full of cold winds

  colder faces

  was it easier

  it was

  what is home but a ratsnest

  a roach motel

  a mad dog thrashing at the gate

  to be let out

  Karen Kraco

  Weeding While Contemplating a Break Up

  I

  Dig deep, get beneath it

  or grab at the base and yank.

  Tease out the thread

  that snakes underground.

  II

  Mass murder. More than a little guilt

  as I pull industrious lives

  before they can fully express themselves.

  Never to flower nor go to seed

  yet propelled like the rest of us

  by a desire to thrive.

  III

  Wrong place, wrong time, I tell them.

  If only you had landed in crazy Mary’s yard.

  She would have let you live, talked with you all night.

  IV

  Just under an hour to clear the vegetable bed.

  I would say I should have done this sooner

  but it’s easier to grasp what I do not want

  after it’s been around a while.

  V

  The ones I always miss

  masquerade as the desired.

  Same leaves, similar flowers,

  but if you look closely

  something’s amiss.

  VI

  Damn. Sometimes

  I make a big mistake

  and get rid of the good.

  A cucumber plant tangles

  in my rip and yank, or an onion

  just coming into onionhood

  pulls up with a clump

  of grass. I tell myself

  it’s an accident

  but right now

  I really don’t know.

  Studio

  Don’t worry about death

  at least that’s what I thought he said

  as we reach and reach toward the far wall, then hinge

  into triangle pose. Glad for permission,

  but still can’t ignore the ache

  the slow burn as I try to balance.

  I’m missing two corners

  of you-me-us.

  Flatten it out, it’s more about form than death.