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.
