Three Poems

Contrition

My son asks me how to write a poem
I tell him the story about the woman
who feeds her son oatmeal, he doesn’t want it
but she doesn’t see that—or maybe she does,
jamming the spoon into his clenched mouth
until she hears it clang against his
chipped teeth. He cries, says he’s sorry.
She puts him in Time Out where
he sits facing the wall for hours,
days, years, threatens to throw him
into the middle of next week if he turns around.
He sits there until he faces her as a man. She asks,
Do you remember the color of the oatmeal bowl?
Now you’re ready to write a poem.

Drone

Here we are now, the wasp trapped between the window and me.
He feels the cool breeze of freedom like a secret lament.
This is the last time I’ll see him alive. But he’s moving on
and so am I. Today I am speaking in the mother tongue
in which living and dying is the same language. Today
I want to hurt something, smash something between glass and hand.
The wasp in his black muscle T and striped pants so tight
his ass looks like a bubble. I tap the pane. Watch his antenna move.
He must feel grounded. Or cornered. Misses his mother.
God Save the Queen. God’s mercy is missing.
Maybe he’s lost hope. Maybe he wants to jump.
Or wait for the wasp rescue squad that’s just not coming.
And after his passing, I’ll speak fondly of him

as if he never made the wrong choices. Never climbed

around my neck to sting me. I will never forget the redness,

the swelling—the gift that keeps on giving.
But you must move on and so must I. Does he believe in posterity?
Decorum implies that I stop but retaliation seems the only way.
I am the horrifying other who can’t be located or identified. I am
God’s missing mercy. Today we’ll gather our incomplete information,
our faint knowledge of each other, and plot each other’s destruction.
He cannot find his way back to the cool breeze of freedom.
This is the last time he’ll see me alive. Today I struggled. He struggled.
The universal you struggled. Without sentiment. It happened.
Here we are now.

True Story #2: Missing

First a foot, then the whole body
found wedged upside-down behind
a tall bookcase,

a young woman missing in a home
she shared with her family
most of her life.

Eleven days misplaced,

the police surmised she simply fell

adjusting a TV plug behind the shelves—

simply, as if she disappeared
to that land of lost socks and
missing keys

and could be retrieved
simply by believing it so.
Her sister passed her bedroom

without stopping to look
but could not put her finger
on that unfamiliar odor

soaking the house in loss.
It doesn’t matter, at this point,
if they believed it was a kidnapping,

or death or escape.
Only the following remains:
a little thing miscalculated, collapsed,

and gave way. What new fear
will guide their silent house at night—
her absence pinned against a plaster wall.

In the end, it wasn’t enough
to see her every day
to love her silence and her shaky grace.

They seem convinced of
a quiet so deep
even common sense can’t intrude on it.