Doodles, Between the First Great War and the Next
Fatherhood came on a river of sweets, each new confection a tiny raft: Peter Paul Mounds and Milky Way, the darling Baby Ruth. A national thirst barking for mugs of A&W and Canada Dry over chipped ice. Dodie, too, effervesced, dressing their boy in a store-bought suit, his toothless mouth sweet as a maraschino.
Doodles was buoyant, a float of unflappable patience. Kiddo, you could eat him without salt, Dodie bragged, the others groaning beneath a cottonwood, dabbing chicken fat and beer froth from their lips as Doodles waded into the Meramec. Supine, adrift, he bobbed on the current like a lure on great lengths of line, until Seward whistled from the car and brought him back.
In the city he was professional, proprietor of a pharmacy that each day grew more mercantile than medicinal, counters heaped with branded goods, with Pond's and Wildroot, Zippo and Beechnut. The homely tar soap and lanolin jars gathering dust in the stock room, his heartache stowed on the highest shelf—Kaiser lover! Goods jamming the aisles like flood debris, and then the crash.
Flop House
Figure he pushed away from the bar—Seamy side of life, adio!—fingers dimpling the red vinyl bumper—what? ten times? before he headed home—Come on, honey, how's about a kiss?—the Rusty Nails quieting the benzedrine buzz as he drove into the glare of a late suburban sun.
Some farewells take a lifetime.
Kitchen gleaming; wife, starched and mildly tanked herself, stirring chili con carne. I'll serve it in a tureen! Card tables in the dining room set with tally cards and bowls of mixed nuts, ice bucket sweating on the hi-fi.
The children, talcum-powdered and sulking, build oyster-cracker forts on the formica in protest. It's still light outside! But mother finesses them with a trick from Good Housekeeping, a pirouette toward the table, glasses clacking on the tray that trembles above her head as she chirps, A round of Shirley Temples for the house!
[First published on Web del Sol]
A Reading
The poet declares the body didactic; and I yearn for yours, desire sparked by the sight of a girl on a bike, calves pulsing as she pumped up an incline. Child, I long for a bite of you, eight years old, drenched in sweat as you stole away from me, the glee of misdeeds flushing your face. I want to hold you in my mouth, your slick summer neck clamped between my teeth like a newly whelped pup. To know once again the flesh and bones of us before gravity gained momentum. When you were perfect—lash, tendon and toe—and I equally new.
These days, you assemble yourself as if parts were missing. Nails buried in acrylic one day pale as beer, the next like bruised plums. You call your breasts a hazard and consider their reduction. Ach du, retain what makes you matter—the dense pounds and lipid pints, each nerve bundle and your blunt, lovely teeth. Or release them to me for safekeeping. I, the failed Empress of Air, my body beginning to slide like layers of an over-iced cake.
[First published in The Prose Poem: An International Journal]
Viscid Poetics
The first one flew out like a fetus past due—bruised and blotchy, twitchy limbs and howling mouth. One fist around the cord, refusing to vacate. Barely composed myself, I could not versify.
All week my son had been wandering the streets, calling on the hour as he scoped out the perfect place, the correct moment. Taking me on his last ride. An extended goodbye, the ache manifest only in his voice and even that was shredded by the static of a bad connection.
I saw the wall that would deliver him, enough concrete to absorb his pain and leave me with nothing but a dial tone in my hand. The poem shaped like his end, an embankment—solid and final—like the Luger my father kept in his desk, a form of insurance against the end of love.
[First published in slightly different form in The Spoon River Poetry Review]
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