We Inherit What the Fires Left
Page 2
I give without ever offering.
On the ride home, after I have
quieted the bark, an officer
pulls us to the side of the road
and asks me whose car I am driving
my family home in.
THROUGH THE NIGHT
The snow fell and fell on the way back
from New York, the already hardened
pitch of the new day made impenetrable
with a never-ending sheet, and I knew
I could’ve stayed the night in that city
that was not my city, I knew I could have woken
early with a clear sky and a generous star
loving up the highway but I left anyway.
It wasn’t safe or even wise but it was hours
I didn’t feel like submitting to, and I guess
it’s ironic that I spent so many
years living in death’s quarters, taking her
confident hand in my own, pretending to wipe her
kiss from my cheek every morning because I knew
I’d be back, and then one day I didn’t know.
What I do know is that once I was a boy who lost
his fear of dying, watched cemeteries get fat
on his friends and then I found you, a home
just outside of the blizzard, finally a sweet
death worth chasing after.
HOMECOMING
I bought the house before we married
before we conspired to make
another
a four-bedroom with space for all
of my ghosts, dear god do you remember
the first time it got cold & neither of us
had ever heated a house
from scratch before so we shoved aside
the boxes filled with baubles and Christmases
before we met, huddling under
my old college comforter, which could’ve
been beautiful before
you asked how old the comforter was and I
pretended
to not hear you, already, with my mouth full
of you, which meant
years & her
& the number I stopped answering
calling
the rest of the night
I spent staring at the pattern on the ceiling
never once confusing them for stars while
you
acted as if you were too
tired to stare at them with me
besides, you didn’t need them and the heat
had come on
SOMETIMES WE CAN’T DO ANYTHING ABOUT THE BLOOD
Sometimes we can’t do anything
about the blood,
our pediatrician tells us
about our daughter’s nosebleeds.
She assures us
it’s the dry air perfectly
natural
not the time I was fifteen and took
a beating for staying
out too late. I don’t remember anything
natural about my own blood.
When I found it, there was a reason, a red hand
that was not my own.
I remember after the belt was applied
to me
the way I would scare
birds from the yard
and watch them become
wings, then feathers then a single dot
escaping into the sky
from me. My daughter gathers
words like eventually
wound inherit trial.
Once I was a disobedient boy
& during my punishment I was told
This hurts me as much
I don’t remember
how they slept. I
can recall how the sheets felt like glass
against my striped legs. Our doctor says the blood-
letting isn’t a big
deal, it’s natural
& maybe a humidifier will help.
I remind myself a dry home isn’t the equivalent
of cold. My elders say
we’re too soft.
The doctor asks if we have any questions
but I want to know
where blood comes from, who can conjure
that spell, and how I’m not an expert
having given so much already?
BACKFIRE
Watching her ride her bike,
a car backfires, a leftover fire-
cracker in August I am no
longer a father outside
of his home, a state
bird flies above
a shattered boy—I am
myself all over again,
trying to find something
that won’t splinter, won’t
flay like a mother holding
a young death, saying
the noise will soon fall
into fissure. I knew the sound
wasn’t the problem
even then, even now
I know what a sudden
stop sounds like—a great halting
can break a neighborhood
until all that is left are
gestures. That isn’t
the block I live on now,
I know this, and still I forget
everything built under me
except my name, which
I hold like a long farewell
that has died
once before.
INHERITANCE
Every night my daughter eats a half
measure of her dinner and announces
how full she is, the crust from the pizza still
remains, the corn or peas, broccoli stalks
strategically scattered to the edges of the plate.
I’m not one of those kids that went hungry
or had to bargain with the night to fill myself,
but I remember when my great-uncle
would pretend to eat too and announce he was full,
which was true as he was full of cancer at the time
but no one knew that. He always wanted some
of the cake or pie that Granny was making
and she would say, But you ain’t too full for dessert.
I watch my daughter plead for the last cookie
before bed and we make threats about eating
all of the dinner first, but I’ve already washed
the dishes by this point, so the worst we can say
is not tonight. I don’t know what it is about
uneaten food that makes wardens of us, but she’ll
get the cookie tonight. The last thing I want to posit
is a stay of execution. I remember my uncle would
never actually eat the cake, but would pull
the icing off with his finger, a deep exhale
through his nose, gathering the simplest
of deaths on his tongue. I take the half-eaten
cookie into the kitchen once she’s finished,
even if the cookie is not, the icing is gone, probably
still on her tongue as she pulls on her pajamas,
the sweet tailing her to the next world.
MIGHT HAVE TO KILL
the thing, my father says. His voice is a white sheet
pulled taut over a burial. There is a gopher
in my backyard. Might be a hedgehog or
some other terror. Yard freckled with holes
and shit where the holes are not. There is so
much yard and now less
of it belongs to me.
my father, who marched against the war,
stepped around a uniform by getting a master’s
degree, spends his crop years
low to the earth, pulling flowers
from its teeth, wants me to kill the thing.
It’s easier th
an you think.
We haven’t discussed
other options. He knows
I know that nothing will live forever.
I don’t remember when I first let mercy have
its way with me. Maybe after the third fight
in the first white neighborhood. Maybe after
the summer they pulled Anthony out
of the river. Or the morning after
the fireworks, when my hearing came back,
but two of our party did not.
My daughter wants me to kill
a spider, dangling like a proposal
from the light. I pretend to be a creature,
a chaos coming to get her, until she forgets
the muse hanging from the ceiling. Let me
be the monster if it excuses me
of malice. Let something besides me
survive my recollections.
when we bought the security system, we didn’t get
the motion lights. I wouldn’t know what to
do with an invader if I had my hands
wrapped around one.
I wonder now what would the gopher do
if it knew it were being hunted. I once broke
curfew and ran from a cruiser to avoid
its touch. I fell asleep that night hoping
no one was looking for me, hoping to never
be seen. Hoping I became a nightingale
under a green-black sky.
my father says he knows where I can find poison
cheap. It might take a week to die. To take
the offering, to die. I say, But the summer is
nearly over, and he knows I am still his son.
Or at least a boy who looks like him,
waiting for the sun to finally go down.
CLEAN
Still wet from the bath / the girl has a song /
caught in her skin / she moves side to side /
limbs springing out / like new animals /
stop child, I warm / the lotion and try /
to apply it to a moving / target in and out /
of my reach / hit an elbow then a calf /
the giggles don’t stop / and I practice /
aging while trying / not to fire blanket /
the atomic girl / who laughs at everything /
including bedtime / and I finally glisten /
an arm, chest, left / smiling cheek not /
because I have / gotten better but the child /
has slowed with age / and now a playful hand /
is a potential fist / a scarred knuckle /
the one leg will / become less perfect after /
a fall remember when / I wore crutches, Daddy /
not yet am I witness / she grabs the car keys /
my empty-handed / objection, the house empties /
when she leaves / the first time, a collapse /
of myth, I will remember / before I became /
a ghost ship, wasn’t always / a bedtime or my /
once-confident / hands glistening, holding /
a brand-new sun /
SHARKS AND MINNOWS
The soccer class wasn’t
designed to be all girls
but sometimes you get
lucky and sometimes
your daughter finds herself
surrounded by hard-charging
boys who ignore basic
requests so you test her
with the older class. Here
she looks eight years
old but is not eight years old,
running with the other jubilant
girls, passing with the inside
of her foot, kicking with more
ambition than control
and every so often they play
a game called sharks and minnows
where their coach becomes
an elegant apex predator
and kicks the soccer balls at the girls
as a form of tag. You can
imagine the playful screams,
you can imagine the girls
minnow, lungs darting
away from the would-be fang
of the sea. Once in a while
they invite the adults to be sharks
and I hope I’m the last, I hope
the girls will always run until
their chests are as empty
as a boy’s promise. I hope my aim
with a soccer ball is near miss
enough to recognize the pattern.
I hope games will always dress
themselves as games and water
will feel different against their
darting bodies when the game
is not a game but math is simple
so I know this will not be true
even as I keep missing the girls;
sidestep, jump over and around,
taunt and giggle until it takes
all the language from them
and I think for them this is a good
life so far, this is joy and translucent
and because I haven’t tagged anyone
with a ball in a while and my role
could not be more clear, I begin
to kick the soccer balls harder.
EXPLAINING RACISM TO MY SEVEN-YEAR-OLD
One weekend my in-laws visited
and they brought their dog Peanut
with them, who lays herself out on every
floor of the house unless there is food
present and then Peanut can’t be still,
can’t be oblivious to whatever has been
fixed on a plate even if it ain’t for
her. Each night when the witching hour
arrives, Peanut begins to bark for no
apparent reason and the girl asks me
if I can see what is scaring her, but my
best guess is everything else that can bark, too.
BRIEFLY WE WERE
On the red-eye flight
the girl wakes up before
she was supposed to, wants
to see what the outside looks
like from way up here
in the heavens. What are
those lights? Buildings.
Cars. People, I say. Every light
is a person, she cuts in. More
like each light is about ten
people, I say. This morning
I am clever and too confident
in my answers. All the dark
spaces—are those people dead?
No. The lie leaps from me.
Probably. She may be right.
Surely there are more people
dead than alive by now. We stare
at the black together on the descent
as I pray none of the lights go out.
THE TRUTH ABOUT FAMILIES
I used to think that every parent
believes their child to be one of one
I know a lot of parents say this but—
and what they are really saying is:
this is the best that my body can produce
and this child is the best future
that my insides have wrought.
Is your galaxy vaster
than mine? I wouldn’t argue
that once my wife and I lay in our
too-many-roomed house when the power
failed and the open windows let in
a winter air with not enough noise
so we created a night’s sky in our image,
and my mother is still alive, which gives
our daughter more stories than any one
parent of my parents can still breathe into me.
Once I watched a show
where a man’s daughter stopped breathing
and his grief crashed two planes together—
maybe we make stars in the sky after it no
longer looks like us, too. Maybe this is
what it means to
say your child is like none
other when everyone who was once
someone’s child ceases to exist. I wonder
if I could be so vacated by loss
that I would make everyone’s best
effort fall from the sky, which I guess
what I’m asking is, would I be so hollow
that I could stand to stare
above me and watch the sun pull
my child away to where I cannot follow?
Or am I simply too old now to believe
in everything that produces light?
DESCENDANT
What I recall about my child’s early days
were the deliberate acts of keeping her alive.
Every spot on her hirsute
crown was a coiled infamy.
Jackal: vampire: klutz: you are
told what cannot be
done. My daughter had no choice, clung
to a bumbling assassin. They told
us in parenting class that she would
cry because
she is too small to ever fill. What we heard
as hunger was her literal starvation.
I had not desired anything with such
throat that I could remember
that type of bellow. When we first
brought her crib into
the bedroom, we had no idea what
to do about the night. The night
became the night again and she still
cried. And what was I if not a totem
of ill-prepare? A storm
pulling a lamb to shelter? We managed
the fever the next
year. Sweat beads on her
chest, a forest of splintered child. May
my wife’s arms withstand the shudder
of a giant not yet told how tall she will
loom. In the fifth year she would not
be still or safe or obey
what we knew to protect
her. I know some say the promise is made early
but this is when you know, truly,
that someone will mourn
your death. When she replaces you
as the one most apt to harm her.
I know now that when I say I would die for my
daughter I will gladly play dead for far too long
until my body is rigor and forgotten. My joints ablaze
in the stillness. When I say I would die