Three Poems

Limina

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My father was a fan of work-ethic clichés—no pain
no gain—but sometimes a scream just pings

against bark and nothing much comes of it. I think
of the primate instinct to watch violence from a distance

as a means of learning how to escape it—
the gutted monkey’s voice echoing from tree to tree

while the others scamper to the nearest branch.
“All your best lines are mine,” you say. And it’s true.

We’re in a car. It is night. There are others with us,
your husband. The bodies of deer along the roadside:

dirty fur and wounds like open mouths. I think of them
this time of year, lusting themselves into traffic,

their rutted fuzz left beneath some tree.
I’m working on restraint. It is night

and the pressure of your knee against my seat
feels like a bruise. Somewhere in the West

my father sleeps. He needed an assertion of value
so he left home for other women. I wonder if I would’ve

hurt people with sex just the same had he stayed,
worked the garden that summer, my mother

skinning tomatoes as the bees gathered. But the screen door
opened and closed, and I learned how a man could exist

as what he’s done in the absence of his body, so I worked
at being honest. It was night when I heard my mother

sobbing in the bathroom. I can’t tell if you’re awake,
your head wedged in the crook of the seat. I want

to reach behind me, find your leg, the pulse beneath it.
I’m practicing restraint. I saw my father’s body

untuck like a wasp from sculpted mud. Along
the road, the shoulder blurs with liminal shapes.

Gold Star Pedophile

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The doctor on the radio defines this
as those aroused by children
but who mute desire and never
commit a crime. I think back
to my youth, my thin shorts and how
one day in June behind the garage,
its peeled paint littering the grass
like sloughed skin, I chased the neighbor girl.
Suddenly, engendered by friction
and her giggling, which was like the trickle
of a stream, my member, still hairless, filled
with blood and crept from the cheap fabric.
She looked right at it, didn’t blush, rushed
around the corner. This, the moment
I realized the body was not beholden
to the will or, what I’d later suspect,
the illusion of will—cast shadows
in the cave played out by chemicals
on the stage of my brain, but, anyhow,
I felt sadness and guilt, which I feel
again from the doctor’s pulsing voice.
The law requires a therapist report
any confessed urge no matter how inert,
so, of course, the afflicted go untreated.
I remember the tingle in my neck
whenever the phone rang, how I’d run
to the yard as my mother lifted the receiver
against her breath. I do not commend
the wagoned drinkers, the priests
and their public restraint, but that
forsaken dog who doesn’t bite,
isolated, panting. I come like a child
to touch the garment hem of him
who did not touch me back.

Some Things Are Unpredictable

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like when you go out for a drink,
and a girl, wasted, asks you to find
her clit, and you, being a gentleman,
say, I wouldn’t know anything
about that, and she fumbles
with her pants, drops them,
her pimpled ass in your face
now, you say, I’m sorry,
I don’t know you well,
and she gets angry then,
furious, shoves her fingers
into your gaping mouth
while you, hooked fish, maintain
composure because you’ll never
hit a lady, even if she’s drunk
and heavy and biting your ear
so hard it bleeds, even if her hands
clench your head while you stay
still, like a deer before the shot,
like your mother after your father’s
beer hit the wall, and maybe
you would’ve expected this
had you known she’d lost it
when a frat boy lost a bet,
his face hidden in her green
pillow while laboring through,
which is what she’d expected
of herself, though it hurt more
than in the dream, but still
there are things you will not do
no matter how far others take them
and so you tolerate this floundering
over your hooded body until
the barkeep calls the cops to drag her
to the drunk tank and they
never ask you any questions.