Photo by Alex Totaro on Unsplash
By Saturday
something settles. Next week’s
oatmeal eases into simmer,
the wide slow mouths of the first
few bubbles no longer startle
and pop as the surface smooths,
heaves with the humility
of normal mornings. It’s a chore—
the boil, filtering through
what I know, what is new.
The officers, the children,
the minutes stretching, twenty,
forty. Outside a dozen blackbirds
roil through seed spilled on the deck,
the red stains of their wings
ripple and crowd.
The dog clicks to the window,
barks, birds scatter,
regroup on limbs, the fence, chatter,
then back to the business of breakfast,
the only evidence of flight
a head tipped toward the house,
the already echo of the next report.
Aqualung
Let me tell you about the things
I hadn’t done before I found myself
handcuffed to a cop car.
I hadn’t punched a clock or rented
an apartment. Hadn’t worn a mortar board
or learned the word fiancé. I hadn’t
driven to my father’s funeral. Hadn’t been
in love, though I thought I had. I was never
teacher’s pet, class clown;
I wasn’t the girl they sent to the office again
and again. But here I was with a boy over
six feet tall fastened
to a cruiser in a parking lot in Jackson Mississippi
while Jethro Tull played Aqualung. I could
hear it from where we waited,
shifting foot to foot. Music and light washed
over the stadium wall and I kept up
the call and response:
it’s just a cigarette, just a cigarette. By now
the lies are all tucked in
to behaviors I can claim,
but then, I couldn’t decide if I was
angry or afraid—arguing while the boy
stood mute—officers testing for residue
the final song of the set winding down
...spitting out pieces of his
broken luck
Hey Aqua lung.
Tumble and Fall
I was surprised to learn
Mary J Blige had covered
Stairway to Heaven, but by the
second verse, she had wrenched
the song just wide enough
from the past
to open a tunnel leading
straight to the only time
I ever cheated in school.
It was Business Skills, and I
couldn’t catch the other girls,
names ranked on cards according to
achievement, forty words per minute,
eighty. I hovered around twenty,
so when they announced
the poster contest I knew
what to do. We rifled the cushions,
found $8 for velour poster board
and permanent markers.
You were the artist,
four years older than me, and traced
Led Zeppelin’s hermit, glued it
to a black velvet sky
while I inscribed lyrics in shorthand,
took credit. Even I knew
your future was fraying,
nothing anyone could do.
A decade later I pleaded
for you to learn to type—
you had bottomed out again—
the only ladder I knew
was the one I had climbed.
But you couldn’t see the point
of all those rungs.
The poster didn’t win, and as
Mary J swivels toward the final verse,
the arrangement wobbles and I’m afraid
she’ll do something new, change
this thing we shared. But she glides down
the last four measures like a glass staircase,
your life, mine,
tumbling right behind.