5.02 / February 2010

Son, Litterateur

Eric Burke

My mother built a concrete block wall to hold up half our yard. (We lived on a slope.) Father helped. When she was sixteen, my sister got pregnant. When the baby came, mother buried the umbilical cord in a cavity she had dug against the concrete wall (“near the bones of its mother”). Next week, father built a basketball court below the wall. “But it was all for naught,” he explains. My sister had lost her ability to play.

Homage to the Sprats

She is domineering (perforce) and decorates everything (“perforce”).
She likes the view through their scratched-up storm window.

A picture hook hangs empty on his study wall.
(He distrusts everything explicit.)

Eric Burke lives in Columbus, Ohio, where he works as a computer programmer. More of his poems and short fiction can be found in Thrush Poetry Journal, bluestem, PANK, qarrtsiluni, Escape Into Life,decomP, A cappella Zoo, Weave Magazine and A Clean, Well-Lighted Place. You can keep up with him at his blog at http://anomalocrinus.blogspot.com/.

5.02 / February 2010