to say about that. That’s all I ever knew
to say about my sisters: There’s two of em.
I bet I coulda stomached a brother better.
Even when I was a little grommet I wanted
a brother, so I practiced on this pet lizard I had.
He was one of them color-changers that could
change his skin to blend in with whatever’s
below him. I named him Tony and took him
around with me. Showed him how to do
whatever I was doin. Talked to him and tried
to explain things. I remember wearin tie-dyed shirts
and puttin Tony on my shoulder so I could
watch him change. One day I had him on the back
of my hand while I was hot-wheelin down the street
and he jumped off and I ran right over him.
What do you say about somethin like that?
Afterwards he was so flat he looked like one of them
outlines of a lizard in a coloring book. No blood
or nothin, like nothin was in him. I’ll be damned
if I know what else to say about that.
I don’t even know why I told you about it.
Would you believe me if I said I never got over it?
Never got over the fact that when he died
he was the color of my hand?
OLD CHURCH
Haunted so we didn’t follow him
inside. Posing at a broken window
he thumbed the dusty pages, preaching
like our dad. Between passages
he puffed his cheeks and wormed
his fat tongue between forked fingers.
This is what your mom worships,
he said. We never told him to stop,
just started chucking rocks from the fence.
First at the shards of stained glass
gummed in the frame like shark teeth.
Then at him. Then at him harder,
his face popping up between our fire
like a self-winding jack-in-the-box.
The bad throw that connected
ricocheted so we didn’t see, just heard
our cousin scream. We froze, bracing
for darkness to burst out the door
and roar toward us. But it didn’t.
The heavy hinges creaked and Josh
stumbled out holding his lowered head,
pleading for help. At ten years old
I was ready for rage, even death,
even ghosts. But not this: his blond hair
bright with blood, his moan.
MOORCROFT
You gave me a ride when I was lost
in Wyoming. Took me to your home.
Showed me your gun collection
you had to go shoulder-deep through
the clothes in the closet to reach.
They were old and unloaded, you told me,
and you didn’t shoot them anymore,
just oiled them and kept them perfectly
clean. I was careful not to flinch
as I watched the double-barrel raise
and train on my face. The tooth hole
you flashed in the grin after.
The spasm in your hands as you swung
the gun and pointed it at yourself
to show evenness. You told me
about doing five years for murder,
asked if I would’ve done anything
different, finding a grown man
raping my six-year-old niece.
I wouldn’t change it, you said.
I wouldn’t take it back. You patted
your heart with your hand.
Family is family, you whispered,
as you brought me clean sheets for my bed.
LIVING WITH THE ACCIDENT
There was little you couldn’t do.
With the purple stump of your thumb
you pinned a pencil against
the knuckle lumps, forming enough grip
to sketch her portrait from memory,
or from the photo you kept hid
in your hatband. You worked the ranches
like before. Rode horses. Knotted
ropes. Shuffled when you dealt.
You let me ball old newsprint
for the fire, but you did everything else.
Gutted the fish. Stuffed the belly
with berries and butter and smoked it
by rotating a willow stick.
And when you folded your hands
nothing folded, but what kind of world
would this be if that mattered?
Your cheeks filled and flickered
as you chewed. The embers bedded down
and the clouds born out of them
twisted through the cottonwoods.
You never told me her name.
That could jinx it, you said.
If I find her again it aint gonna be
as a detective. You could even roll
your own cigarettes, but you couldn’t
roll the striker on a Bic.
I flicked it alive for you. Your palms
pulled my hand toward your lips.
FIRE
There was a time when we didn’t know
how to make it. A long time. We ate animals
burned alive in forest fires. Developed a taste
for rare, for medium. Collected embers
and kept them going for generations, firewatchers
in caves danker than prehistory. We roasted
mastodons. Designed skewers, ovens, steam pits.
Invented broiling. Slept with rocks
for the well-held heat. By the time we learned
how to urge smoke from sticks there was nothing
left to do we hadn’t already done. We cooked
the same, slept near it the same. The difference
was control. Control kept us going. We smelted
iron blooms in bloomeries. Hammered slag.
Fullered blood gutters to keep the longsword light.
We branded rams—horn, loin, rack, and flank:
Crazy K, Lazy 3, Half-Diamond Flying Double T.
We seared ears off sows to hear if the witches
would scream. They didn’t. But the children did
as they crawled away from their napalmed feet.
We made zippos, lifeboats, strike anywheres—
no more bow drill or piston or plow, no socket
fit between the teeth, no calloused hands, no ash
in throats, no 9-volt woke with steel wool—
the flameless, the catalytic, the everlasting.
POLAROID
A loose flap of skin passes just below
his eye. Bruises ride the bridge of my nose.
The dark ropes of handprints grip
both our necks. Our fresh buzzcuts
lumpy with goose eggs. It’s easy to forget
we were trying to kill each other.
Or at least I was. But what I wonder now
is why our father shot the photo before
he bandaged the hole where the nail
went in, stuffed my raw mouth with gauze.
We stand side by side against the garage,
eyes focused just beyond the lens,
each pointing at what we did to the other.
LILLIAN
Tarkio, Missouri
Don’t worry about your shoes:
there’s nothing you can track
in the door I aint killed before.
Never had a lock till the freeway
came through. Suddenly a gun’s missing
from my pickup, tools from the shed.
Go ahead, open the blinds.
Those are apples on the north end,
grapes on the west, tomatoes
out back and corn beyond that.
Goat milk sells as pet food
but people know to d
rink it.
I gotta laugh to have you crash here—
been trying to get rid of men
altogether. If you were an inch taller
I’d have left you on the side
of the road. Got this double bolt
the same summer they laid
that freeway. Not trying to lock you in,
just making sure the rest stay out.
Don’t worry, I never had to kill
nobody. Wanted to kill plenty,
thought about killing even more,
and now with my stuff going missing
in the night—makes me feel crazy,
but the only crazy thing I ever done
was get hitched in Hawaii once.
And Vegas another once.
I figured it was love and I’d worry
about the rest later. Well, the rest
showed up. Now I keep busy
with the plants and animals.
SHORT BED
a hundred yards offshore, locks
the doors and takes the key with him
for no reason he can think of.
Crunches back across the bay to the snow-
sculpted pines on the point, rubbing
his hands together as he walks,
from time to time blowing into them.
Each year in Fargo, men put money
on which day the ice will buckle
under the weight and another truck
will join the sunken junkyard
piled however high on the rust-powdered
lake bottom. The younger men
choose their days based on weather,
average temperatures, and what’s supposedly
blowing down from Crookston.
The icefishers gauge their days
by the holes they drill, the relative thickness
they go through. And year after year
Clausen puts his money on May 17th,
and each year he loses, the truck
never lasting past April. He stands
among the great norways
on the shore, the shards of pink bark
flaked off for the routes of squirrels,
misted down onto the snow
like pale blood, nose-blown. He glances
over his shoulder at the truck,
the eye-burning clarity of hard angles
amplified by the drawn sheet
of the frozen lake. He faces the hill
and blinks away the afterimage.
BETWEEN BOULDERS
Not the last flicker going out, but the wrap
of risen wind on charred wood in the dark.
Not the abandoned copper mine with broken
windows at dawn, but my hand taking a bronze
plumbing pipe to the river. Not the dog’s velvet
belly, burst open and spilling wet maggots
on the train tracks, but the tiny pliable femur bone
of a mouse found inside there. We say I feel
so alone, and we mean we don’t know how
to communicate. We say The dog is dead
and we mean we aren’t listening anymore.
In the growing light I carry my pipe
to the river. I pack it with stolen tobacco.
I hide between boulders. I have no filter,
no friend meeting me. I light it and suck
and my own wind wraps what is inside there.
COUSIN JOSH GOES OFF ON FOOD STAMPS
Fargo, North Dakota
First thing is, I got as much right to get my food stamps
as the next man. Second thing is, what I make of em
is my own Han Solo. State aint got no right
comin around sniffin halfway up my ass, tryin to catch
some little whiff of a goddamn infringement.
If I wanna fetch my breakfast with em, fine,
let a cowboy fry his bacon. If I wanna sell em for cash
or trade em for dope, that’s my own Han Solo.
You think I’m gettin rich outta this?
You think I’m puttin some greenbacks away someplace?
Saint me somebody if I’m flush in more than bellybutton lint.
And anyways I’m only sellin em to veterans.
That’s the third thing. A lotta vets can’t even get
no food stamps, and you mind tellin me why?
You think them boys went off and lost a leg
in Iraq or some other ass crack of the planet
just to come back home to trade me a dime sack
and some percocet? What? So they can hobble
their broke ass down to Deals Only and garner themselves
with nothin but a stone cold bite of somethin to eat?
You tell me. Me, I don’t even wanna guess.
And the other thing is, what’s the difference
if I got two-three a them food cards?
Who am I hurtin? I’m askin you—who am I hurtin?
And I know right off what you’re gonna lay on me.
You think I’m reachin in and stealin them tax dollars
right out your own privately owned ass crack.
But the thing is, I aint got your goddamn tax dollars.
Where you think all them sorry-ass one-legged vets
is comin back from? Disneyland?
War aint the Lord’s plan, I can tell you that much.
Course, neither is food stamps. Lord’s got two hands
and he aint askin for handouts with neither of em.
And you can bet your whole hard-on
he aint givin em away neither. That’s why I stopped
prayin. Lord aint givin and Lord aint takin.
Lord’s reachin out same way a tree reaches.
Real slow and easy. Sorta callin you in
without callin, cept maybe with the wind.
And your job’s as simple as goin to him, cause you’re lost
and you know it. And that’s the same shake
them vets was expectin to get when they come back
one-legged, but they didn’t get that, did they?
No they didn’t. Got percocet. And they’ll be dosin that shit
till the day they’re dead. What’s that old sayin?
Send me home in my casket. Well, tell you what,
the minute I’ve gone and dropped off dead
and been laid to rest, you got my god’s honest say-so
to bust open my casket and stick a straw
up my ass and suck and see if you find any flavors
that taste just even a little bit like your goddamn tax dollars.
CLAUSEN’S DOG
We float the rubber lifeboat down the cul-de-sacs,
through the backyards of prefabs and ramblers
where the tops of small trees beckon like oil-
blackened hands. We’re looking for animals.
Dogs and cats and other pets left behind
because leaving them behind was the rule
during the evacuation. For hours there’s nothing.
Silence and the sculling of a plastic paddle.
The far-off gas station sunken past the pumps.
The hundred-year flood covering everything
three feet deep. When we find Clausen’s dog
it’s not where we were told to look. Not curled
on his roof, not barking from the glassless window
of his attic. When we find Clausen’s dog it’s tied
to a cinderblock with a choke-chain leash,
an earflap lapping softly at the surface.
The chain cinches down through loose neck
flesh to visible bone, a minnow hovers
in the eyehole. When we find Clausen’s dog
the colorless fur clumps like a stubble of bunchgrass
receding from the furrowed plains of the ribcage.
The bobbing sidemeat nibbled by perch.
Chunks glau
med away by turtles.
When we find Clausen’s dog the bone-paws drag
the bottom like lures, jerking forward
on the same wrist-hinge as the living paws
of a sleeping dog, whimpering, trying to run
inside a dream.
CHECKING FOR TICKS
Before I strip off my clothes I stoke
the fire with oak so the light will last.
I start with my arms, fingers running
the scar carved by the bunk bed’s lip.
Chest. Pits. The belly where surgeons
tempered my hernia, my mother rocking
in the emergency wing, praying
without words. Balls. Taint. Inner thigh.
I trace the shin where the bone broke
and growth plate popped out of place,
my brother lifting me to the Taurus
and gunning to Fargo Medical. The heel.
Eight grooves between the toes.
I close my eyes and do the next part
by feel, contorting to reach my back:
the blades, the ribs, the small, the hips.
I scan my scalp where the concussion’s lump
still stands, those two nights my dad
stayed awake with me, my head in his lap,
a frozen ham held against the hill
in my hair. Cowlick. Widow’s peak.
Finally I find one hooked near my ear.
When I rip it free some of me comes away
with it: a crooked circle of translucent
skin larger than the tick itself.
I lean forward and blow it into flames.
LYLE CLEARS MY THROAT
Boone County, Kentucky
Fair warning: I gotta roll my mother
every half hour or so to curb bedsores,
but I wanna hear this story. Just keep
it down cause she’s asleep and I need
the door cracked to hear her heart.
Well, not her heart. The monitor is what
I listen to. It’s been a year this June.
I come upstairs and found her on the floor,
drove her to local before they coptered us
to the U. Let me roll her quick and you
can start your travelogue, which I’m dying
to hear. Where we’re at now, she can’t lift
her own arm, but if you lift it to start with
she can ease it back down real slow,
controlling the speed and choosing
where it lands, you know? They got her
on a food tube and all that, machines
tracking her heart and lungs, the works.