The End of a Season
The sun is already starting to set.
There are more leaves crunching
under her cleats than clinging to trees.
She kicks the ball ahead of us
toward the parking lot. She doesn’t
answer when we call her. I catch up
and she’s crying. I know why
but don’t ask. An endless flock
of birds fly above us traveling away
from one season and into the next.
Somewhere else a girl has a father
to kick a ball around the yard with
after dark. He tells her everything
will be alright and she believes him.
But here, before halftime, when she
got close to that goal, I said out loud:
please let her have this, please
and my older daughter looked up
from her cell phone, holding onto
that same hope for a few seconds
before the ball smacked into the post
and bounced out of bounds.
Now the season’s over and we are
walking away. Leaves fall like feathers
and collect by the fence. I want to
pick her up and swing her around,
toss her gently into that pile of leaves,
reach inside of her and straighten
her spine, curved like a question mark,
curved like disappointment. When we
reach the parking lot I don’t tell her
to pick up the ball like I usually do–
instead, we kick it back and forth
as if the soccer ball holds the words
we wish we could say to one another.
____________
Visiting
There are losses more heartbreaking than death
like waiting for morning count to end,
so you can walk through metal detectors
to embrace your youngest child
under the scrutiny of armed guards.
When you get there you can’t remember
the conversation you rehearsed during
your four-hour drive to see him because
you are lost in how his skin sank further
below his cheekbones. How? Just, how?
What can you say when he tells you
he passes time playing cards for push-ups
with a cellmate who is serving time for rape?
His antipsychotic meds give him the shakes,
but he has read four books from cover to cover.
When you call him by his name, he looks
around as if you are talking to someone else.
Before becoming a number, he was your baby.
You will never hug him outside of designated
visiting areas, like this one, where you watch him
devour vending food machine until he vomits
because his stomach has become accustomed
to emptiness. I tell you not to go so often;
what good can come from secondhand suffering,
of shackling yourself to someone else’s sentence?
On your way home, you pull over a dozen times
because of intervals of torrential tears,
but you will go back next week and the week after.
You can’t accept he could have done something
so disconcerting, even though he did.
The only time I see you smile now is when you
tell the story about when you forgot his lunchbox
on his first day of kindergarten and he told you,
Don’t worry mommy, I’ll go home and get it,
you wait right here for me and I’ll be back.
____________
327 Days After Sentencing
The snow, falling all day, makes me
think about you in your cell,
in your head, a clam in a shell,
high or low tide, murky water
that hides sharp rocks
Where do I even begin shoveling?
I dream of us clamming in
the Shinnecock Bay beside the
Ponquogue Bridge using
bare feet to find shells like we did
when we were kids, like we did
with our kids. Now snow falls
heavy like the relentless fear
that I won’t be able to protect
my own children from monsters
disguised as people
they were taught to trust.
Forgive me
for telling a new acquaintance
that I am an only child,
for wanting to forget you’re alive
while simultaneously wanting
to pretend this shovel is a clam rake
that the snow is the bay. Forgive me
for making icicles hanging outside
my window into steel bars,
for not being a better person
for letting all the snowfall
before starting to clear it,
for snapping the handle of my shovel
like how a lifetime ago
I watched you shuck a clam
and snap that blade right off.
____________
Talking About Mental Illness with my Eight-Year-Old on a Snowy April Afternoon
I watch a cardinal use its orange beak to dig through snow for seeds.
A knight for a fish, my daughter asks, is a knight worth more than a fish?
She means bishop but says fish.
The snow was supposed to stop falling by noon, but it’s a quarter of three.
When she asks me how people know if they’re hearing voices that others
don’t hear, I tell her two rooks are more powerful than a queen.
I mean I don’t know, but point to the rook she is about to lose.
There must be at least six inches of accumulation.
On television, she heard siblings of schizophrenics are at higher risk for psychosis.
I ask her why she doesn’t watch cartoons anymore and in one move she puts me in check.
____________
Peel
As I remove the skin from a clementine, you tell me
you may drop the Civics class you’re enrolled in
through the prison degree program because
it gets so loud on your block that you can’t think,
the indescribable sound of pent-up guilt is cacophonic.
I don’t tell you my husband brings our daughters
outside whenever you call. There are only a few
dirty mounds of snow left. I watch my girls run
straight to them with their good sneakers on;
I don’t tell you this either, instead I suggest earplugs,
meditation, humming to drown out the background
noises. You laugh and ask me to send you pictures
of everyone and I say I will, but you know I won’t.
I am pulling apart what you say section by section,
your words seep into invisible cuts on my heart
and sting. I imagine the inmates in your class
discussing citizenship, the rights and duties they
forfeited. Outside, my daughters bury themselves
in dirty snow as if it’s beach sand. You tell me how
no one else comes to see you besides a preacher
who reads to you from the bible then quizzes you
on the material covered. You tell him your meds
make you forget, even though the truth is you
aren’t listening. Really you are trying to tell me
there has to be someone listening to your prayers,
that you need me. I place the clementine down
on the counter. I look outside again and watch my
daughters sculpting tiny snowmen with their bare
hands. Hey, you say, look out the window at the sun,
tell me you don’t believe there’s a God behind that.
Rusty Truck 