The children on our streets of melted tar & bubble gum, stole my

letters, the ones etched into my brow, that daddy

blessed with a toss of a baseball & Hit the Penny, the way he detested

straight lines, his left-handed slant defying borders;

his factory floor, overheating with 120 degree ovens, trafficking in electronic parts, the one

offering to war gods or astronautical tracking devices that would look

into our eyes as the moon rose, pinpointing my dad coming home at

the shifting of light and the quieting of seesaws scraping ground, while my

skates got stuck in city sewer slats and my mother’s

calls through a half-opened first floor window won’t bring me home to watery

soups and the table I perfectly set, full belly

on bread & eggs & split peas begun with fried onions, and

my daddy downed a nightly beer while he

fingered the fading print of yesterday’s Times because he always insisted,

long before I was born, that the news arrived wrong as

the liars lying in wait for the money we didn’t have much

of, so we stood over the kitchen sink listening to a fuzzy radio tune as

he made us maps of his war year journeys through Europe’s forests & towns, while he

pushed songs, Count Basie’s drive & Dizzy’s trumpet tones, so we could

understand the politics of pain, the way ruptured melodies might urge us to insist.