Marianne S. Johnson
Nine Feet East of Roadway Edge: One Shoe
The police report is staccato lines, check-the-box,
fill-in-the-blanks, measured. The mother hands it to me
over my desk with the files of minor tragedies, survivable
accidents piled between us. I knew she was coming,
so I put on a suit; she will want to see me as a lawyer,
not another mother of another nine-year old son.
I tell her that I will obtain the forty-one photos of the scene,
his small torso on the street, the ribs she tickled, his dark
hair unkempt. She doesn’t have to see them, won’t see
the red trails darkening the dirt shoulder, point of impact,
point of rest, in the school zone. The children knew
where to place the roadside flowers. Bright balloons
would leak like lungs, unlike a heart exploding
in a chest, a brain bursting in a skull, a breast
engorged and spurting with a baby’s cry.
I fixate on his shoe: sole up, black as asphalt
with day-glo green laces, how she bought them
wondering if he would wear them out before
he outgrew them, how his feet slipped into
and then out of them as loose as he slipped
out of her and into breath of air.
Tortious
Last night I dreamt of butterflies
fluttering soft upon the small boy’s face,
his temple of asphalt wounds, blood
ponds, reflected in their stained glass wings.
The sound of my pounding heart
frightened them off, they rose
and strained against the gravity
of his hematoma chest. He was not mine.
A morgue shudder, my nightmare
hand clutched the bone cold table.
Monarchs circled above us, when my own
son’s face morphed onto the broken body
as the head turned to me, pulpy lips mouthing
“It didn’t hurt, mother.” A scream
jackknifed my lungs, choked
on the gallows weight of night.
Tort, torture, contorted
tonight, I am wakeful very late
and watch my sleeping son in his bed.
His twelve-year old body thrashes itself awake,
I cocoon into the small of his small back,
the room fogged into a chrysalis. “Mom, I’m fine,”
he mutters annoyed, but I stay a little,
listening for his eyelashes to wing off in flight.
Lessons for the Week
Tuesday night, my son studied
a Holocaust survivor, scrolling
the shrinking roll of Jewish names,
battered sepias of children before
their internments and tormentors.
Six million Jews were murdered,
and at least one million of them were children.
Yes, he is learning that.
My eighth-grader came home to news
of the Newtown 20, just nine days
left on the Christmas calendar.
Eyes stuck stoic in front of the TV
he asked if they were all first-graders
“like my buddy at school.” Yes, I said,
like your buddy at school. “I helped
him get his lunch today,” he stuttered
and I imagined the weed-stalk of him
bending low to hug his assigned bud,
look his little guy in the eye
and rustle him off into the wind.
Yes, he could do that.
Weekend deep in the terror of it,
I woke up screaming—his face
pasted onto dead children,
a young body in the morgue
thrown by a speeding car, swollen
with the violence of their embrace.
I fled the hysterical dark to his room,
his voice scraped awake with “what?”
but nothing escaped my throat.
In the morning whirl, he asked about
“that boy who skated” into the road
and I begged him never to do such things.
There was oatmeal and apple slices
in his promise. Yes, he could do that.
Wrongful Death
1. Plaintiff
I can’t move. An oddity on display.
They stare at me, a flightless bird-
creature from some obscure island
beyond any imaginable map’s edge,
I have buried a child, wretched thing
that I am. My boy-egg broken on asphalt,
a boy-petal crushed in the road,
boy-flesh of my flesh ravaged by metal
rubber and gravel. The boy-less mother—
if I exist, then fate is indeed cruel
and unusual. The unthinkable happens,
savages the earth; it vultures ‘round school
grounds and street corners. I’m the proof.
They can’t take their eyes off me.
the floor at the mention
of his name. I won’t move.
If I move, the monsters under the bed
will know I am there, again. The monstrous
must account, the monstrous must
answer for this dark.
2. Attorney
I cannot smile. Retained woman,
smartly dressed at counsel table
made up face, disaster on my lips. No better
than the Barbie doll anchor serving up
the deaths of 135 in a plane
crash, live at five. I must speak
the unspeakable. A suit who filed suit
for the death of the boy. They hate me
already. How dare I ask
the value of a nine-year old in a grave?
Calculate the number of goodnight kisses
in a boy, compound the interest on his
soccer moves, the grades and grandchildren
left unearned. Price tag a love lost.
How can I? It is all I can do. He could have
been mine. He could have been theirs.
3. Juror
College is out, summer animates the halls.
This room, larger than I pictured, filled
with suited players, not the small,
swarmy stage of mockingbirds and
southern winds. The black robe
in charge crows to the lawyers
from his perch, captives in paper chains.
My name called and assigned
to seat number six, next to Five,
who looks like my Gramps when he
folds his arms. His children were grown
by a stay-at-home mom; they still breathe
and pay taxes and sweat in their beds.
What does Five know about single mom?
She could be a space alien to Five.
His bowels growl and it is still only morning.
Will I hear her womb scream, from here?
4. Attorney
Twelve faces lined up in an egg carton,
on the edge of breaking open in my hands
over the rail between the facts and their vanilla
safe, engineered, routine. They are about
to catch a nightmare, as if it could breed
like a germ I breathe on them. Tilt back
in the rack, as far as they can. Except for
number Six, whose body shifts toward me
and the horror I parade back and forth. She
wants to grab my hand as in a movie theater
when the music tenses just as blackbirds
murder on to a screen.
5. Juror
Mom shoulders into a fetal curl,
penitent as a nun. Only a handful
of
years older than me, looking
a hundred years past dead.
She was me when she had him,
his tiny fingernails like fish scales
from pre-natal stew. A photo of his shoe
in the road, laces loose. He put them on that day
without a clue. His ten fingers, plump
as caterpillars gnawing a dirty palm,
would die within reach of her.
Her own hands weep in her lap.
A ruffle of crow wings. A bowel grumbles.
A throat clearing. A womb screaming.
6. Plaintiff
My ears are bleeding.
My eyes are blood-black.
My mouth is pooled black.
My uterus is pulpy road kill on the exhibit table.
Their eyes autopsy our lives—
every detail stitched with
womb memories, cut anew as a tomb
freshly hewn. Atrial muscle, a peeled
and sliced blood orange, pinned
to an emptied breast. They stare—
my hands bleed inconsolable.
7. Attorney
“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,”
8. Juror
There are 100 trillion cells
in the human body, and one quarter
are red blood cells. I learned that
in biology class. Do her cells remember
his, laced in the membrane of red
between them? Her every breath sends
a purge of atoms that mourn him. The vein
in her neck is pounding out a dirge.
9. Attorney
“From the forensic, can you track the
boy’s path until he was struck by the car?”
My ears are ringing.
Mouth of desert. Number Six
cradles her flat belly and rocks.
in black. He could have been—
no, he was
ours.
Anthony
was never ten. He was never a senior
with a license in his pocket, never
a rapper or a bagger at the market,
or a lover stockbroker with chardonnay
leather satchel. Dark eyes never saw
more than nine, once caught red-
handed with skateboard
on the roof of the school
by the super, after his homies
flew the coop. Call your mother, son,
to pick up you and your board, the dude
said. Still only nine at springtime,
black Vans and a natural tan, father-
less and stepfather-less again,
after mom came off a twelve hour
shift into a smackaround.
Anthony calmed his sisters, listened
to the walls heaving, his black hair
sweating like a highway in the desert.
When I grow up, he thought, when I grow
up. Anthony did not see May break
into that April, never saw a girl’s blouse
unbutton in the backseat throes,
never saw the silver sedan blow
through the school zone as he darted out—
Kate Magill
Nest Study #1
The nest in dead branches is not an empty nest:
rimed over with questions and brimful with winter,
unperturbed by the wind that threatens to whisk it
from the place where it was made, needed, abandoned.
A room woven of leavings—red thread and tinsel—
bound up for a season and slowly dispersing.
To come home each day to such finely tuned debris:
I’m sure now, here, that I could make do as a bird.
To slip between currents and make of wind a home,
knowing every dwelling is weightless as your bones
and temporary as the blood that stirs about
your labyrinth, the headlong chambers of your heart.
Nest Study #2
We built it of bottle caps and rusted barbed wire,
of green plastic army men abandoned on the beach.
We built it of sanded down seaglass, of seedpods,
of cow skulls revealed when the snow melts, pure and bleached.
We scavenged five-cent cans from culverts,
traded cap erasers for small stones,
caught frogs and fed them the right kinds of flies,
named them after villains, after heroes.
Maybe somewhere we saved up all the chewed stems
of the leaves of grass we plucked, sucking for sweet,
the buttercups we shone on chins,
the dandelions we unleashed,
propelled by whistles, pirouettes,
as we learned how our bodies,
their hither-thither breath and limbs,
could be the origin of wind.
Whatever’s Left
You need to stop reading.
The languor of someone else’s structures
holds nothing, offers all the sustenance
of stone,
of floating.
You need to stop reading.
You need to change your gaze.
The words of others are not made
to hold your days,
the heat and strife and anguish
of your living living body.
Your body.
You are made
to contain and expel,
to hold and to tell
to go forth and put forth and hold forth and hold worth—
How to measure the worth
of a moment snagged from time?
How to measure the worth
of the hook, of the line?
It may all come to nothing.
How to frame the invisible,
make its elegance plain.
It will all come to nothing.
You need to change the gaze.
Double vision—not enough.
A singular vision—not enough.
Is it enough after dark
to feel the heat of the day
come up through the soles of your feet?
Enough to taste
the heart of the matter,
tongue its bloody pulp?
Enough to say you’ve tasted it?
Someday the heat will drain
from all the promises you’ve made
and whatever’s left
will be printed
on someone else’s page.
Happy Here
an onion
an avocado overripe
stray garlic skins
and coffee grounds
a lingering smell of bleach
so deep in your skin
you can’t scrub it out
sooty footprint from the peppermill
sweaters half knit with dog hair
fly shit speckling the windowsills
the grit of a year’s worth of days
a day’s worth of years
greying itself into your bare feet
a promise you’d be happy here
white mug half black with stale coffee
not enough room in a single sentence
for happy and here to coexist
here the cupboard full of nothing
where the mice like to shit
and over there the sack of rice
fifty dollars worth of rice
dribbling onto the floor
mingling with dead skin and flies’ wings
the little bastards chewed a hole in it
keep coming back for more
failing fluorescence overhead
broken clock blinking an impossible time
and you struggling to remember the shape of the world
before the matter of yours and mine
sour milk smell from the fridge
cream you never bother with
cream you keep for guests you never have
do you long for the days
the fugitive days
the promiseless places
empty cities
cities full of cold winds
colder faces
was it easier
it was
what is home but a ratsnest
a roach motel
a mad dog thrashing at the gate
to be let out
Karen Kraco
Weeding While Contemplating a Break Up
I
Dig deep, get beneath it
or grab at the base and yank.
Tease out the thread
that snakes underground.
II
Mass murder. More than a little guilt
as I pull industrious lives
before they can fully express themselves.
Never to flower nor go to seed
yet propelled like the rest of us
by a desire to thrive.
III
Wrong place, wrong time, I tell them.
If only you had landed in crazy Mary’s yard.
She would have let you live, talked with you all night.
IV
Just under an hour to clear the vegetable bed.
I would say I should have done this sooner
but it’s easier to grasp what I do not want
after it’s been around a while.
V
The ones I always miss
masquerade as the desired.
Same leaves, similar flowers,
but if you look closely
something’s amiss.
VI
Damn. Sometimes
I make a big mistake
and get rid of the good.
A cucumber plant tangles
in my rip and yank, or an onion
just coming into onionhood
pulls up with a clump
of grass. I tell myself
it’s an accident
but right now
I really don’t know.
Studio
Don’t worry about death
at least that’s what I thought he said
as we reach and reach toward the far wall, then hinge
into triangle pose. Glad for permission,
but still can’t ignore the ache
the slow burn as I try to balance.
I’m missing two corners
of you-me-us.
Flatten it out, it’s more about form than death.