I.

I shaved it off
instead of using her cream,

little did she know.
I found the razor.

I liked the feel of it.
The almost-bleeding.

II.

It was the one thing I ever asked of my mother:

Can I shave? Can I shave yet?
Bleach my body’s follicles.

My arms had too much hair,
looked weird at the pool party:

my legs, soft, black matted.
The razor, sharp-edged tool

gently scraped oil from skin.
A baby duck can’t find its mother

if you touch it.

III.

I wished I was in Egypt,
where my cousins hid their faces.

Walk like an Egyptian, America taunts,
sing that Bangles’ song,

I stick my belly out when I dance,
higher than my hips.

I stick my mouth on your mouth,
tongue higher than my teeth.

America sings, even my father.
He wore star-spangled shirts,

cheered USA! USA!

He told friends to call him Johnny,
bleached Mohamed at its roots.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_10/Domonkos.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

The spring I am seventeen, I love a boy who drives a 1972 Thunderbird, a relic from a decade before. We blow off afternoon classes or cut school entirely, wandering upstate. We’ll get away with it, he says. We’re honor students, mathletes and Most Likely to Succeed, only an idiot would challenge us. On those days, we park at the top of a ridge, the Thunderbird’s beak peers over a lake into the woods, only a snarl of roots keeping us from overtaking the shale. We crank down the windows to whistling breezes and winking sunlight and rarely budge from our nest.  Deep in its split-bench seats, through our smirking, herby haze we dissect Kafka, nukes and whether Stairway to Heaven is the greatest fucking song ever written. It is.

One time, he tells me that when he was eight his dad drove his mom to the emergency room in the Thunderbird, her wrists shackled in dripping dishrags barely up to the job. She didn’t come home the next time he brought her there.  The floor mats still bear the scars of her suicide.

One time, suspended from the track team for missing so much school, his fists slam the three-spoke rim-blow steering wheel, his rage accelerating with each blast of the horn.  He swears he’ll kill that asshole coach and the whole worthless pack. They’ll never make it to the championship without him. My heart thumps in my ears as the Thunderbird pushes closer to the edge.

We carve an elegant plan to backpack the world and conquer it, youth hostel by youth hostel.  And definitely, he makes me promise, as he holds and kisses my clammy hands, we’ll die young together. We are just beginning and have an endless supply of days to throw away.  Death is nothing I dread. That spring I love a boy who kisses my hands and is passionate and deep.

We kiss for the first time in the car. It is here we wrestle naked, sticky, sweet. It is here he loves me until he doesn’t, and laughs while tears trail my sorry cheeks and fog the tiny opera windows.

In late June, the Thunderbird escorts him and someone not me, to prom.

In August, it delivers him to Cambridge.

Ten years after, a state trooper finds the car as it peers out over a lake into the woods, only a snarl of roots keeping it from overtaking the shale. Deep in the velveteen seats, he has chugged whisky and exhaust.  There is no note.  There is one witness.

You were the only one on that bus who was white. You did not talk like white people, you did not dress like white people and you did not own white people things. You carried plastic nun chucks held together by tape and you played with cardboard throwing stars. You had a poster of Bruce Lee and you called your dilapidated house, the crib.

The day that our school busses stopped side by side in the rain on our side of town, I saw you through foggy rectangular glass. Your knees rested on the seat in front of you. Your body tucked in on itself like a small mammal. You were wearing the out of fashion jacket that your brother handed down and a stocking cap to keep your hair, the color of tree bark, close to your head. You had puffy lips, so red they looked sore. I waved but you were too busy being invisible. Two boys play boxed behind you while someone else made beats with his fists on his thighs.

You were mean the day you showed up with your brother and the camera meant to take pictures of my mother. Your brother was the artist who painted pictures of my mother, on canvas, on buildings, on his bedroom wall. The bedroom he still had in his mother’s house was the only house full of white people in the heart of the black side of town. Your mother’s house had the long gravel driveway up the long backyard, overgrown and colorless as an old man’s chest hair. You were not like explorers full of deigning enthusiasm. You were not the Ingalls, nor we the Osage. You sucked your teeth like everyone else when Ray Ray turned funny and started wearing tiny pig tails and plastic jelly slippers. You stuffed candy down your socks and walked out of the store. Your mother bought your winter coats from Diego’s trunk. You crowded in cyphers in the middle of the street for battles; the verbal kind, the dancing kind, the fisted kind. Your sister sat under trees at family gatherings and picked at bumps on her unsunned legs until they bled and made dark spots like rust on apples.

Your family made music on an out of tune piano piled high with school pictures framed in tarnish that sat atop an uneven living room floor with a corner where the boards rotted through. The family whose bedroom doors had no knobs and whose bathroom had no shower and whose tub had the porcelain worn clean off the interior scraping every tailbone. The forgotten family who were all so slight and pale and you especially with high cheekbones and lips like a girl’s. You especially with legs so thin that you never wore shorts, not even to swim, not even in the throes of summer when the air turned to broth. Your legs were your secret, your most invisible self.

My legs were loud. My thick thighs, ginger bread brown and big as a woman’s stretched the terrycloth jumper that fit loosely everywhere else the day you came with your brother and the camera, the day you were so mean. I was seven and you were fourteen. I quit sucking the first two fingers of my left hand a year and half before I met you.

My mother said I stopped just in time “before you turned your big teeth into buck teeth”. You noticed the tip of my middle finger was flat from years of being soggy and compressed. “You’re a big baby aren’t you?” That wasn’t a question.  I loved you the first time I saw your sharp cheeks and girl-mouth.

I was in your mother’s kitchen when I watch you walk up the patchy driveway. “So you’re here to bother me” you grunted while refastening the chain-lock. It was late autumn and the trees were bald and your muddy backyard was depressing but your mother kept the kitchen warm with a tea kettle. You were right; I was there to bother you. I followed you downstairs to the basement where your brother’s room was covered in paintings of women and there was an old drum kit and an amplifier with oxidized bolts and a rug over the dead cold cement floor with a drain at the center and exposed plumbing in all places You started to play a battered guitar made of strong mahogany.  It was your brother’s guitar. Your brother shared his things, it’s what families do. In this creaking damp house full of splinters and treacherous stairs, innards bared by time and poverty, there was art everywhere. You were fourteen and I was seven and I thought, that day, you were my family.

Outside we played warring Indians and you tied me to a tree stump to set flame to a pile of twigs at my feet. Inside we played mobsters and I hid under the stairs of planks worn soft and grey with age. I covered my mouth with nervous hands so you couldn’t hear me breath, my finger nails lined with a thin rim of black dirt. When I sprung to life, announcing myself with the voice of a cartoon gangster, you arched your two fingers and your hand formed a gun. You shot both of my legs so I’d fall to the ground. Next, you shot me in the chest and taught me how to die.

There is a park where the forest is so dense that the canopy barely lets light through. There is a felled tree still attached to the ground by roots. Other trees have grown from its substantial trunk as if they were branches. There is a sign that explains how the tree is still alive and connected to all the other trees by the root system. Once, the land sunk and almost uprooted the tree for good but the roots, connected to the others around it fed the tree intravenously. The land eventually rose up to support it as the branchlike trees sprung up, stabbing through the canopy hoping for its pines to scratch a piece of sunlit sky.

I got lost in that forest, walking away from some holiday picnic, where your sister was preening her shins and someone was grilling and everyone was talking with their mouths full of dry hamburger meat. I hoped you would come looking for me so we could be alone and you could shoot me until you had your fill, until I was full of holes. Instead I met a misshapen man with acne scars who said he could help me find my way back. He had a camera around his neck and he was wearing a wrinkled shirt tucked into jean short. He asked me to stand on a stubby pile of rocks and told me to put my hands on my hips so he could take my picture. He asked my age and I told him seven but we both agreed that I looked much older. I smiled big and cocked my head and said “string cheese” right before I heard someone call my name. My mother and your brother cursed the man to his face, then grabbed my arms so hard and led me back to the picnic tables.

I hated stretches of time between seeing you. They were epochal and could only be measured by growth rings.  Your brother broke it off with my mother because of the night she was drunk and howled his name like she owned him from the muddy back yard before she punched a hole through the glass panes of your mother’s kitchen door and cut her arm and bled on the crooked stairs. In your backyard she became that stump, cut to the quick with her bottom left to decay in the remembering ground.

I believed you when you took me to the church in the grasslands. You folded into the prairie congregation like I blended with you in your basement. God made you sincere. We sat on noisy pews beneath the ceiling of massive beams latticed and laminated, timber glowing from sun poured through skylights. The church was strong, like your brother’s guitar, like your new faith.

You loved someone’s dewy complexioned daughter with limbs as pale and thin as your own. Her hair was curly, dark and insistent like mine. You saw my persistence in her curls. In her limbs, you saw a bridge out of your past, a chance, to not be poor, to be white.

There was an afternoon, a threadbare couch; you made fun of my big legs while kissing them. They turned to knotty saplings in your jointed clutch; a pile of pick-up sticks on the mildewed carpet of a Kansas slum.

We walked through the trees outside of Lawrence where you talked about the future. We crossed small bridges over narrow creeks. Then, you slid your two fingers in my mouth. You told me to make it sexy. I was fourteen. “You’re such a big baby” you said to my face with your salty fingers still in my mouth. You were so mean it was stunning, the pain in my breast exquisite. You’d finally blown a whole clear through me, big enough for you to step through to the other side. We were bleeding Kansas.

Your brothers and sisters eventually marry people who look like those you grew up with. Your nieces and nephews look like me. You married the church girl and bought a house and planted fresh cedars at the north end of the Chisholm Trail.

When I finally saw your legs in sunlight, it was in a picture of your daughter, older than I was when we were lovers, knees indistinguishable from thighs or calves, just narrow spindly sticks that teeter precariously, verging on collapse like learning to walk. I see the legs you both own and I realize you hid them because they were precious to you. That part of me you did not want to share.

In your mother’s basement, we once napped in the room that had paintings but no door knobs. We slipped into your brother’s bed with the same ease as you slipped into his old jacket. The camera was on the headboard. We should have taken a picture. But how do you capture the unburdened sleep of children; sleep that’s as wide and unpolluted as a pioneer sky?

No matter where I am carried off to, no matter how many kitchens I’ve adorned, no matter what I’ve been fashioned into, my insides mashed to a pulp and re-formed for re-use, Like the heavy trunks so mired in that addled backyard a part of me stays entrenched, while you grew legs long like stilts yet light enough to carry you away.

UFO Investigator

From its dark winters, this is Alaska —
terrain unknown and treacherous, white
blinding with snow, and sky black and filled
with these contraptions —

or so they say. These men and women who
burst at the seams with story. Far below zero,
days at a time, I wait. I watch. The lights
reported here, could they

possibly be natures wrath? That volcano
we all remember, or maybe Aurora sparkling
on the horizon. But pilots, to and fro from Juneau
widen their eyes in fear

to tell me: this is where I saw it. This is where
I knew — I knew it was real. In the lower 48
flying is different. Intimately, as a pilot myself
I am so aware

of the way we hug the sky with our wings and
engines. A slip proves fatal in these mountains.
Twelve a year die in avalanches here. Those lights,
that glitter, the unidentified —

we risk breath to learn, to certify
what only the Universe can fathom.

Bermuda

This is where Columbus saw the light
    floating in the distance,

                 a lantern, faint.
Anchored here, I know Earth will forget me,
         despite heavy maritime traffic
    in the area.      Fear is a myth

             in these parts, a concept that
has no bearings on the reality of late summer storms.
        The whistle of the ocean

             ebbs into my ears, a requiem
for the sinking.      But I’ll be saved, as promised
by the mysteries that preceded me,

the boats and planes that disappear here,
skeptics claim as hoaxes.

            But I see the dance, the lights that
sparkle on the horizon, where no land waits
to hold the flame.

                 Here is where I’ll greet
our makers, a dot on a satellite

you’ll never locate,
                 my breath the same as the salt
             stuck in this air forever.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/Stevens.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

“I’d like a pork pie,” I said to the old man behind the counter.

“We don’t have any more today,” he said. “We have chicken now. That’s it.”

“Then I will sit here until you have pork pie,” I said.

“We are closing in fifteen minutes,” he said.

I looked at him. I reached over the counter and tried to put my finger on his face, but he slapped my hand away before I got close.

“May I kiss you?” I said. “Open mouthed? It is my goal to kiss men with terrible teeth and ugly tongues open mouthed.”

“Get out,” he said. “We are closed now.”

“I have ten more minutes of this,” I said. I took out a gun, and I took out a knife.

“This gun is from the war,” I said.  “And this knife is from the war, too. First, I brought another kind of knife to the war, but soon I found it wasn’t strong enough for the kind of work I was doing. So I got this knife. This knife held up great in the war.”

The knife was black-so black it could have been wrapped in magician’s velvet.

“This knife would hold up great in you,” I said. I showed the old man the knife. I gave the old man the knife.

“You take the knife,” I said. “I can let you have it because I still have this gun from the war.” He held the knife. I pointed the gun at him. I drifted around the storefront.

“Now, let me give you the gun,” I said.  I gave him the gun. “You have the gun and the knife.”

“Get out of the store. We are closed,” the old man said.

“I will not leave until I have a pork pie,” I said.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/McMeekin.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

I’ll give her this: the black lipstick really enhances her sneer. But it’s all the further she’ll go, the sneer, at least this time. If I didn’t have something she wanted – the keys to the Civic – she’d make it a hat trick by giving me the finger and yelling fuck you. But nothing she can do will convince me to let her drive to God-knows-where with some random poor-intentioned guys without providing me locations, names, periodic phone calls, and a solid curfew.

“Why do you even care?” she says.

“I always care.”

“But I’m seventeen.”

“Doesn’t matter. You’re still my daughter.”

“So? You’re still my father and I don’t need to know everything,” she says. “You just don’t trust me. For no reason.”

Recognize this conversation? Most people lucky enough to have had parents that gave a shit took part in some form of it dozens of times.

She’s wrong, though. This has nothing to do with trust. This has to do with the fact that I can’t concentrate when I don’t know where she is. It’s a lifestyle issue for me. Because the big problem here is that I love her, and since she was born her existence has made me very, very afraid that something might happen to her. But explaining that has never worked – she can’t see it, not yet. So I flip it on her, tell her something that happened before she was born, something I know she’ll think is unfair and manipulative. And she’ll be right – what happens in life is often unfair and manipulates everyone and everything.

A year before she was born, I tell her, I found my father dead on a white plastic chair in the middle of his back lawn overlooking Puget Sound. His mouth was open just slightly, making it look as though he didn’t care at all that the rain had scattered what little hair he had left, revealing too much of his freckled scalp, or that his sopping wet flannel shirt sagged over his belly, revealing too much of his yellow chest.

I tell her that beside him sat an empty coffee mug smelling of orange juice and rainwater and in his pocket hid an empty plastic bottle of the Percocet he’d been taking for his hips. Also in his pocket was a note that was too damp to open – I had to wait for it to dry before I was able to read what he’d written. The note contained a list of instructions detailing what to do with probate as well as the locations of the keys and access codes for the lockboxes, safes, and bank accounts. But it said nothing at all about the decision itself.

Nothing.

As I spoke, she stood there, that black lipstick still helping her show how cruel I was to tell her such a thing. A bastard.

And maybe she’s right.

I told her the story in order to illustrate how a moment like that would change a person’s entire outlook on life and instill in them not only a deep seeded fear of losing those they love, but also the need for those loved ones to provide locations and names, check-in often, and adhere to curfews. I was trying to coax some empathy from her in order to more easily obtain the information that would allow me to thrive for the next six hours. But if I’m a bastard, it’s because I made a few parts of the story up. It was the gardener who found him initially, it hadn’t rained, and the note was far from empty – it was really more of a novella illustrating a whole mess of reasons why he killed himself. But none of those facts would help deliver the message I needed to get across.

And it did get across. I know this because now that I’m done talking, she just stands there, no sneer, arms crossed, motionless by the door. She doesn’t know quite what to do. But she gets the point. I can tell. And I’m not surprised. She’s a sharp young woman. My guess is she’s hasn’t said anything because she’s trying to figure out how she can still be indignant after what I’ve just told her.

For a millisecond, I spot what I think is suspicion pinching her penciled brows, and I think she might call bullshit on the story. But some of what I’ve just told her confirms what she’s already heard about her grandfather. There’s enough truth to it that she won’t take the risk.

And she doesn’t. But I know soon she’ll find a way to continue the argument, a way to be pissed, probably inside of a minute. Like I said, she’s sharp. And she’s too much like me not too.

As she watches me, I feel something happening in my stomach, the kind of discomfort that usually comes when I’m not being as straightforward as I could be – perhaps should be – with my daughter. I can see how it might seem unethical, even cruel, to invent extra details about an already sad event in order to make it more powerful so I can get what I want. But the truth, what I know for sure, what I’ve already tried to tell her before – multiple times – is something that she really can’t hear, and will never spark her empathy.

It’s this: I know that teenage boys are, at all times, an inch from indiscretion. And the boys she hangs out with? What can I say – I don’t trust them. And while she’s strong and willful, she’s also seventeen and prone to giving boys the benefit of the doubt when they don’t deserve it. I hear her talk on the phone with her girl friends. These boys, these victims of suburban angst, they can do anything they want and she’ll psychologize about why they did this and that until it seems the punks are completely justified in their actions. “No wonder he’s like that,” she’ll say. They could steal her car – which is actually my car – and she’d find a way not just to forgive them, but love them for it.

I remember when I was sixteen wearing a jeans jacket loaded up with band buttons and some Robert Smith starter-set eye shadow and how I viewed women even in spite of my bleeding heart. I was a dog. The only thing that interested me was finding a way. There was this one girl who I invited to see The Cure when they came to town and after the concert we found ourselves in the back seat of my car going further then we should have. She didn’t exactly say no, but she didn’t exactly say yes, either. It’s not something I’m proud of now. But it was something I bragged about then. You get the point: I know what teenage boys are like, I know what my daughter is like, and I know how easy it can be for boys to push things too far. And I know how convenient it is, afterward, for everyone involved to pretend nothing happened.

My daughter and I are silent together for an amount of time that is beginning to get uncomfortable, even for me. I rock back on my heels, trying to be patient, trying to give her a chance to respond to what happened. But in the end I can’t help forcing the issue.

“Address, or no keys. Names, or no keys. Phone on, or no keys. A call at ten, or no keys. Home by midnight, or no keys.”

“Dad, c’mon.”

“The truth, or no keys. That’s final.”

She cusses under her breath and pulls out her phone. “I’m texting you the address.”

In his note, my father said he wished he’d told my sisters and I more, which was odd, because it seemed like he spent so much of his life telling too much. Our ears got so bruised that the last thing any of us wanted to do was hear another word. Yet he hated it when we talked. You could see it in how his face would scrunch up with pain just before he was about to interrupt us and finish the conversation himself, a move that remained his signature to the very end.

I get the keys out from my pocket and toss them to my daughter.

She grabs them from the air.

I turn and walk away before she can beat me to it.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/Walsh.mp3″ text=”listen to this poem” dl=”0″]

The two threads of your lips push together, then jump to meet the pinpricks dotting your pupils, dancing above the luminous shirt as soft as your skin as soft as the hair on your arms, your ears perfect like little spoons opening, onto the white wall that records the name of every man you’ve loved, every mouth you’ve felt brush across your thin threads.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/SmithStevens.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

There are the boys and girls with India ink tattoos. There are the boys and girls who wear black. There are the boys who swim in city pools during heat-waves, pools with names like Italian gangsters, watched by the girls who suck on sour-apple Blow Pops while lying on towels grabbed from the shower rods of their parents’ pristine bathrooms. There are the boys and girls who have smoked cigarettes long enough to like them, but not long enough to need them. There are the girls with heart-shaped sunglasses, in colorful bikinis, on deck chairs whose legs are sinking into the hot black tar of rooftops. There are the boys in baggy jeans and wife-beaters, up on those same rooftops, who are not afraid of heights. There are the boys who roll blunts expertly, their legs dangling over the edges of the roofs. There are the Japanese girls with skateboards, the Korean girls who wear boys’ basketball sneakers, the white girls who say “Yo.” There are the white boys who rap, the black boys with neon glow-sticks, and the Spanish boys with pierced tongues. There are the girls with dyed black hair, bleached hair, fire engine red hair, the girls with steel-toed combat boots, the girls with mesh plastic slippers from Chinatown, the girls who give blowjobs, and the girls who do not. There are the boys and girls who feel that they own the city, who do not work summer jobs, who get cash allowances from parents who are out of town. There are the boys and girls who are curious about what will happen if they swallow a pill they find between the cushions of a couch at a party, or if they hassle a homeless man, or if they befriend a homeless man and bring him home to their parents’ apartments for dinner. There are the boys and girls who are on good terms with their drug dealers and baristas, but on bad terms with their orthodontists and shrinks. There are the boys and girls whose parents go out of town to the Hamptons, or the Hudson Valley, or Connecticut, the boys and girls who throw parties for which they make day-glow fliers. There are the boys and girls who drink strawberry-kiwi wine coolers, who throw up inside grand pianos, who order ecstasy like they are ordering a pizza. There are the boys and girls who are nostalgic for a time they can’t remember, a time before they were born, another century. There are the girls who scratch their arms with safety pins, and the boys who press their faces against the back windows of 6 trains, watching lights-red, green, yellow, blue-slash the darkness of the tunnels. There are the boys and girls with nicknames: Raven, Mickey, KJ, Dee, Peaches, Big Ben, Little Ben. There are the boys whose fathers are in jail, and whose brothers are in jail too, who somehow live in Upper West Side apartments by themselves even though there are just fifteen, who everyone envies. There are the girls who shoplift from drag-queen boutiques, pocketing costume jewelry, unafraid. There are the boys and girls whose parents are artists and architects and rock stars, the boys and girls whose mothers had them when they were already forty-eight, the girls and boys who were adopted from third world countries, or first world countries, or this country, somewhere in the South. There are the boys and girls who form crews, who spray graffiti all over downtown, and take the train to Brooklyn and do it there, and all over the walls of their own bedrooms.  There are the boys and girls who hang out with twenty-something movie stars who play street kids, addicts, sexual conquistadors-characters no different from everyone. There are the girls who like girls, and the girls who like boys, and the majority who like both. There are the boys who like boys, and who like men, and who have slept with women twice their age. There are the girls and boys on rooftops, singing, watching the sun go down behind New Jersey. There are the boys and girls in K-holes and bad trips. There are the boys and girls who have been to Paris and Tokyo and Belize, who say, “I will never leave this city again.” There are the boys and girls who feel old and young at the same time. There are the boys and girls who say, “I feel like something’s going to happen.” There are the boys and girls, so many of them-there are packs of them, swarms of them, hanging low to the ground, misting over the city like fountain-spray carried by the breeze over a park. There are the boys and girls, making it happen. There are the boys and girls who will not wait.

These poems are presented in PDF format in order to retain the author’s intended formatting.

[wpaudio url=”/audio/7_8/Kaiser.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

The summer Mikey Cotter moved into his uncle’s house we built a fairy city out of mouse bones. We put twenty traps in the woods with cheese and peanut butter and caught nineteen mice. We hid the mice up on a high shelf in the storage closet in my garage and a few weeks later, they were ready.

“Pee-ew,” I said.

“Mmmm, fresh meat,” Mikey said.

We picked the fur and dried up guts off the sharp little bones and carried them to our fort in the backyard made of old strung-up bed sheets. Mikey crushed the skulls under his tennis shoe because he said we had no use for them. The ribcages were the roofs and the leg bones were the white divider lines on the highway. Mikey named the bone city Axl Rose after his favorite singer, so we plucked a rose from Mrs. Landrud’s garden and made it the centerpiece of the town square.

“Does it look too girly?” I asked Mikey. He asked me if I hated girls.

“Yes,” I said, because I thought it was the right answer.

“I don’t,” he said.

“Well, I don’t really hate them,” I said. I didn’t. I was one.

The sun was coming through the sheet behind me and making my back hot. The big flowers on the white sheet cast shadows across the town. “There’s a storm coming to Axl Rose,” I said.

Mikey made a sound like thunder.

“Do you think the fairies will come?” I asked.

“No,” Mikey said.

“Why not?”

I thought he didn’t hear because he didn’t answer. But then he pointed to a big black beetle crawling over the highway line.

“The real things will scare them away,” he said.