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BOOKS BY AI

Vice, 1999

Greed, 1993

Fate, 1991

Sin, 1986

Killing Floor, 1979

Cruelty, 1973

Title

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Dedication

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

TO THE SURVIVORS OF CHILDHOOD TRAUMA AND TO GWENDOLYN BROOKS

THE POEMS IN THIS BOOK HAVE APPEARED IN THE FOLLOWING MAGAZINES AND ANTHOLOGIES:

Callaloo: “The Greenwood Cycle,” “The White Homegirl”;
Canary River: “Dread”; Columbia Magazine: “Rude Awakening”; Crazy Horse: “Intercourse,”
“The Psychic Detective: Identity”; Divide: “Greetings Friend”; Estrella Mountain Community College:
“Family”; Etruscan Press: “Fairy Tale”; The Manthology:
“The Broker,” “The Calling”; New Delta Review: “The Secret”; Pacific Review: “Lullaby,” “Grandfather Says”;
Southeast Review: “Delusion”; Witness: “The Psychic Detective: Fantasy”; The Writer’s Garret: “Passage”

Dread

DREAD

My name is Shirley Herlihy,

but to the lowlifes on my beat,

I am Officer Girlie.

They do not mean to diss me.

It is a sign of respect

that I let them think is ok with me, and it is,

when I am trying to do my community policing.

After my brother disappeared

at the World Trade Center,

the word went out.

The lowlifes even gave me a bouquet of flowers

I could not accept.

They came from the Korean store

before somebody tossed a Molotov cocktail

through the front door

in retaliation for a “situation”

that involved the girlfriend of a drug dealer

shoplifting disposable diapers and Tampax.

The fact is I appreciated the thought

if not the deed.

I mean the flowers were at least a sign

I had not become a cop

turning a blind eye on the misery of the street.

I was known as someone who was tough,

but fair in meting out justice.

God knows it’s hard to toe the line

every single time a perp messes up, but I tried.

If somebody’s mother needed a ride

to a bail hearing,

my transportation specialist,

Bobby J, the gypsy cab guy would oblige.

I’d say thanks by slipping him

tickets to a ball game, a movie

or some lame excuse for entertainment.

I kept the wheels turning,

so I didn’t fall under them.

I only had to use my gun once in two years

against a sonofabitch

who murdered his uncle

and hid his body in a dumpster.

Original, huh?

Stanko, the wino, found him on his garbage rounds.

We cornered the asshole in an alley

behind that shooting gallery

in the building that’s now been gentrified

and is home to a decorater, six cats

and stacks of old cool jazz albums.

Anyway, the asshole said he had nothing to lose

fired and missed, fired again

and clipped me in the shins,

but I got him as I went down.

He died, but the paramedics revived him

and now he’s in prison.

He’s born again and keeps claiming Christ has risen,

as if nobody heard the news.

Once in a while, he calls me to apologize

and proselytize. I let him last time,

even as I sat, holding the telephone,

wishing my brother would come back.

I keep telling myself he’s gone forever,

but it’s so hard to accept.

He was always rescuing things

when we were kids—injured cats, birds,

even a German shepherd

who had been known to bite without provocation.

I used to tease him by singing,

“Patrick Kevin’s going to Heaven.”

I wonder if he made it,

or if he’s suspended between the life

that didn’t mean much to him

and the death that means everything to me?

He was such a good boy.

He would have been a better man, if only . . .

After our parents died

when I was fifteen going on twenty-five

and he was twelve, we raised ourselves.

No one else had the time.

It’s a busy world out there

the addicts tell me and I believe them

because I know.

I bet they’re lining up at Smitty’s

crack house right now to score.

I should be there to arrest someone,

but I’ve turned in my badge and gun

and come downtown to search this crater

for some sign of Pat,

even if it’s only a feeling

that he’s still around in spirit at least,

if not in body.

There’re just a few of us

who won’t give up.

With our shovels, picks and garden tools

we dig among the hunks of steel,

the concrete and remnants of people

who went to work one day

and vanished into our memories.

I dread finding him and dread I won’t

as I choke from the fumes less poisonous

than the hope that keeps me awake at night,

but I can’t give up.

He’d do the same for me.

Patrick Kevin Herlihy, I repeat under my breath

as I uncover another credit card

and a wallet with something that looks

suspiciously like blackened flesh fused to it.

I turn them in and return to digging

until faint from the effort and fumes, I collapse.

Two other searchers take me by each arm

and help me to a chair,

but I don’t stay there long.

After a candy bar and a glass of water,

I’m back at my task.

On the job, I never questioned what I was.

I had my role to play

in the day to day give

and mostly take of the criminals

who inhabited my world,

but this sixty acres is a city of ghosts

and I don’t know where I stand with them.

When I arrived this morning,

nothing greeted me but the wind

and a grackle making a din

as it pecked and scratched

at flat, charred patches of ground.

Maybe it’s a good sign

that the birds have returned,

a sign of rebirth. But whose? I wonder,

as I stare at my bruised hands.

Last year, I solved the robbery

of a palm reader.

As a lark, I let her read my lines.

She said, “In the future,

you’ll find the one you lost,

but it will cost you.”

Now as I stand above a hole seventy feet deep,

looking down, I don’t see Pat.

When I call his name,

my voice is swallowed up by the roar of machines.

At first, that sound signified the possibility

of finding him

and made my heart beat faster,

but now it’s just the white noise

I hear in my nightmares

that always begins at the scene of a shooting

that occurred during a domestic disturbance

between a man and a woman in Queens

that left two teens bereft of a mother and father

and made them cling to one another much too tightly,

so that now the one left behind is frightened

by her utter loneliness

and drinks Irish whiskey at the pub

where her brother, Pat, used to hold up the bar,

promising the patrons he was going to quit drinking

one of these days

and to assorted laughter

call for another round of drinks,

knowing his sister would never let him

sink as low as he wanted to go.

He’d seen the fight. I hadn’t

but I was haunted too

although I tried not to show it,

especially to him.

That day when I got home

from basketball practice,

I found Pat cowering under the stairway

as I had so many times before

when our parents fought,

but this time, I knew something was different.

He wasn’t crying for a change.

“Are Mom and Dad fighting again?” I asked.

“They were,” he said, without a trace of emotion,

then he told me Dad had come into his room,

hugged him and said goodbye.

That’s when I knew something terrible had happened.

All the years since, I’d nursed him

through the rough times, the blue funks

and the highs that were too much

and always ended in a rush

of promises to stop drinking.

He worked construction, he’d say,

I wouldn’t catch him falling off some scaffolding

high above Manhattan,

even drunk he could maintain his balance.

The truth was he was often unemployed,

but I supported him.

I’d long since moved into our parents’ room,

but he stayed in his

across the hall from where they’d died,

surrounded by all his trophies from high school, comics

and posters taped and retaped to the walls.

The week before the attack,

he’d told me he was going back to work.

He’d stopped drinking for good

and I believed him, as I looked deeply into his eyes,

and saw a boy who having barely escaped

the inferno of family violence

would still finally perish in fire’s cold embrace.

DELUSION

I watched the Trade Center Towers

burning, then collapse

repeatedly on television,

until I could see them clearly

when I shut my eyes.

The blackened skies even blotted out my vision,

until I screamed and threw myself on the floor

and rolled there as if I were on fire.

That’s when I decided to go and claim

my sister’s body.

The doctor said I had suffered a psychotic break

and in my delusional state,

it didn’t matter that she wasn’t there.

I carried a photograph of two women laughing,

one of whom was me, the other a stranger

I met on the street, but I pretended she was my sister.

It became my passport into the suffering of others.

I never took money, only sympathy.

I tried to repay everyone

by serving coffee to the firemen and police.

We shared our sorrow,

ate it like bread.

It was our defense

against the senselessness of it all.

They “wanted” to believe that I was seeking

someone I’d lost

and I absorbed their need.

I understood the power of belief and used it.

My phantom sister gave me the power to deceive.

Since I didn’t know what was real anymore,

sometimes I thought I’d died

and was a ghost come back to haunt myself.

I’d catch a glimpse of someone familiar

in the mirror before she disappeared

beneath my face.

Was I a mask the past had taken on,

or some magician’s trick gone wrong?

Maybe instead of being sawed in half,

I’d been sawed down the middle

and to the gasps of the audience

part of me had run in one direction

and part in the other.

I searched for my sister,

until at last, the looks of pity and concern

I’d learned to accept without question

made me yearn for escape,

so one day, I packed my suitcase

and faded into the landscape

where it all came back to me.

When I was twelve and my sister was ten,

she drowned in Cape Cod Bay.

At first, we swam side by side

in water so calm and blue

it was almost too beautiful.

When suddenly she sank beneath the waves,

I tried to save her, I really did,

but I couldn’t stay underwater long enough.

I could have blamed myself

for I had coaxed her

into swimming so far out when she grew tired,

we couldn’t reach shore easily,

but I didn’t, I was almost relieved.

She was my parents’ favorite

and she annoyed me endlessly.

She would have pulled me under, wouldn’t she?

I had to save myself.

At first, I didn’t even miss her,

oh it hurt, but like a blister

when you burst it,

then it heals and you forget how it felt,

but I began to dream about her.

Sometimes she cried,

but mostly she claimed she hadn’t died at all,

but was simply lost

and finally, I thought I found her

when the Twin Towers came down.

At nineteen, I dropped out of college,

left my family and roamed from city to city.

Sometimes, I took my sister’s name.

I played a game with myself.

Who am I today? I’d say, staring into the mirror.

Sometimes like a vampire,

I cast no reflection.

Other times, all I saw

was my wild desire to bring her back.

I was tired all the time.

I quit, or was fired from job after job.

Finally, I asked my parents to send money,

which I used to buy green contact lenses

and breast implants.

I dyed my blonde hair red

and adopted a brogue.

I learned to step dance

and joined an Irish troupe and went on the road.

I did what I fantasized my sister would do.

My mind flew everywhere like a bird on a dare.

I resolved to remain in flight,

but one night, during a performance

my feet simply would not move.

I had to be carried offstage

and lifted into an ambulance.

In the hospital, I chanced to see

the horrible events of September 11th on TV.

The day of my release, I told a nurse,

“I’m well, you know,”

and she didn’t even glance my way,

as she replied, “That’s what they all say.”

On the way to my apartment,

my sister came out of hiding.

“You’ll find me at ground zero,” she whispered

and I answered, “I know.”

“I had a conversation with the dead.

It was all in my head,” I said aloud.

No one paid any notice.

I was just another person “with issues”

and on that day in particular

attention was focused elsewhere.

So when I showed up at the lodging

for relatives of survivors,

I had an identity at last

that combined the past with the present.

Still, I couldn’t find my sister.

I wondered if she had vaporized,

or whether her body, or part of it

was fused to some piece of metal

I would never see, much less feel.

Maybe she was sealed in a room

beneath tons of debris, I told myself,

then I thought I heard her calling my name

over the cacaphony of machines,

the voices of rescue workers,

and dogs barking

when they caught the scent of a body,

only to discover another body part

and slink off dejectedly,

until at last, even they lost heart.

By then, I didn’t have to pretend

I hadn’t given up myself,

and given in to the grim truth

unfolding before my eyes.

I came to hate the lie of my sister

even as I became a symbol of sisterly devotion.

I knew I wasn’t worthy,

yet, I couldn’t stop the forward motion,

propelling me toward the ocean

where she drowned

in glass, metal, fire and ash.

When I couldn’t stand it anymore,

I said I got word she’d never been there afterall.

I had received a mysterious telephone call

informing me she’d left her job

at The World Trade Center months ago,

but didn’t know how to reach me.

A friend had seen her photo on a kiosk

with my contact number on it

and had gotten in touch with her.

Now she was calling to tell me

to come to her immediately,

so I packed and set out,

but after a few weeks in Atlantic City,

I felt irresistibly drawn back.

I rejoined the search,

until someone remembered me from before,

pausing, unable to allow that I had somehow

fooled him and asked why I had done it.

I’d run out of lies by then

and the energy it takes to keep

those multicolored balls spinning in the air.

I only wanted to be somewhere the grief of others

was as overwhelming as my own.

He didn’t understand,

so once again I made a narrow escape,

and found my sister waiting on the Red Line in Boston.

She hugged me, saying,

“We should come here more often,

just the two of us”

and I agreed, easing into the seat beside her.

“There’s seaweed in your hair,” I said

and she replied, “I don’t care. I’m dead.”

Then she laid her head against my shoulder.

It was so hot, my blouse burst into flame,

I told her I wouldn’t let her down, I’d hold her,

but like all the other times, I let her go.

At the next stop, I got out,

but instead of walking upstairs

and taking Amtrak to New York City,

I stepped into the path of an oncoming train,

because I preferred to stay in the underworld,

with all the other missing boys and girls.

FAIRY TALE

The first time I heard the story

of Red Riding Hood,

I was so afraid of the wolf

I dreamed he ate me for dinner.

The next morning,

mother found bite marks on my arms.

Even though I swore they weren’t my teeth,

she punished me for lying

by tying me to a chair,

facing the object of my dread—

a woodcut of the wolf in Grandma’s bed,

but I knew it wouldn’t make a difference

because the wolf had chosen me.

At twelve, I turned to model airplanes

and my dreams became a means of escape.

High above my body, looking down,

I’d find the wolf in my bed,

as if he too had been released

from some nightmare

and finally could sleep.

Eventually, I dreamed of girls,

but even so, my nocturnal emissions

often ended in visions of the wolf

dressed in women’s clothes

whispering my name seductively.

I came to him every time he came to me

just like the kamikaze did in nineteen forty-three,

when the United States was at war with Japan

and I was a pilot.

For some reason, neither of us fired at first.

We just flew side by side,

staring at each other

across the great military divide.

He wasn’t wearing goggles

and I swear I could see his eyes

gleaming like black opals

and the expression on his face

was the one the wolf wore

the first time he tasted me.

I think we Catholics call that look transfiguration.

I don’t remember how long our strange communion lasted

before I fired on the bastard.

I flew through the smoke and flames

of his disintegration sure that his death

had left me changed and whole,

but today, when borders and oceans

can be crossed as easily as tossing a coin,

as I am on my way to San Xavier Mission,

suddenly, I hear an explosion,

while all around me, the desert steams

under an empty turquoise sky

and once again, I feel as if I am a fragment of myself.

The highway stretches forward and back without traffic.

I am alone, yet I know the wolf’s returned to haunt me

as I stop the car by the side of the road.

When I close my eyes,

I remember watching with horror and relief

as the kamikaze’s burning body

shot from the wreckage of the plane

and dropped into the ocean below.

I made it home in one piece,

at least on the outside.

Now I’m retired, in good health,

relocated to Tucson, Arizona, from Baltimore

and I’ve returned to the Church

after forty years of drifting between the New Age

and whatever “this” is.

I breathe deeply, open my eyes and start the car.

I drive the few miles to the Mission,

where I learn of a terrorist attack on New York City.

I ask Father Anthony if what I experienced earlier

was a premonition,

but he says, “My son, I don’t know.”

“A miracle then,” I ask.

“Only if you pass certain tests.

You didn’t save anyone, did you?

But if you saw the Virgin, or a saint . . .”

“Only a wolf,” I answer, “and a dead man.”

“Was the dead man a good man?”

“Maybe once upon a time.”

“So was Adam before the Fall,” he says.

“Perhaps it was Satan you saw, for this is his work.”

“Yes, Father,” I say, but I don’t believe that either.

The kamikaze was only a man

and the wolf, I must admit at last, is me.

“You aren’t the wolf,” he says mysteriously . . .

“I’m not?”

“Don’t you remember I absolved you of all that?”

“No, I’m getting old,” I answer.

“So are we all, but some of us moreso.

You know the wolf is not necessarily evil.

To some Indian people it is a protector spirit.”

“But what could the wolf protect me from?”

“Yourself?”

“I’m not convinced of that,” I say.

“Then come have coffee,” he says.

“We can chat about this latest manmade disaster

and wait for the Second Coming with bated breath.”

“You are so eloquent, Father,

but I’m not in the mood for conversation.”

“I’ll just pray, until I run out of words,

then I’ll howl.”

“Have you noticed the absence of birdsong?

It’s as if they know of the tragedy.

All right, all right I’ll go.”

“You know the way,” he adds,

laying a hairy hand on mine

and I glimpse behind his benign gaze

the face I know so well.

The reports say people jumped to certain death

when the jets rammed into the Twin Towers.

Rather than let death come to them,

they went to him,

their clothes billowing in the wind,

making them look like the kamikaze

in a fiery tailspin.

I kneel, staring at the altar,

trying to connect the dots of my life

and not getting anywhere,

as mother looks at me with a wolfish grin

and pinches my cheek,

encouraging me to repeat with her,

“The end.”

RELATIVITY

Mama says she was lost,

says she asked directions from my father

and doesn’t know how they ended up in bed,

or how they created a baby from one afternoon,

a chance meeting at a streetcar stop

in the Japanese neighborhood of Denver.

She was married.

When she told him she was pregnant with his child,

he said, “Go home to your family.”

The rest is history, is my story

and I don’t know how it ends,

but I hope it’s painless when it does,

unlike the end of their affair

which left her gasping for air

as he boarded the streetcar home

to his family and a deep sleep

untroubled by dreams of souls to keep,

but my mother was another story,

Catholic, seventeen and married,

abandoned by the man

she describes as being kind to her,

but how kind could he have been

when he left her to fend for herself,

left her at the top of the stairs,

where she calculated that a fall

might end it all

and sent herself tumbling down them,

only to realize when she came to at the hospital

that she had survived and so had the baby

that was growing inside her

like the truth she could not hide.

When she confessed to her husband, he beat her.

While he was out drinking,

she called her mother and father in Tucson.

They sent her uncle Bill

to take her back home.

She says Uncle and she rode the bus,

not talking until they were out of Colorado.

Uncle had cried when he saw her.

He was that way, you know.

He didn’t like women, they said,

he was one of those men,

but they didn’t hold that against him

so he was dispatched

to bring my mother and her bastard back.

The family decided that they could hide it all

by allowing everyone to think

I was the husband’s daughter.

They didn’t worry about the future,

or what that lie might mean to me.

On my birth certificate,

it says he’s my father,

but I always knew he wasn’t.

The two times I saw him,

I realized my mother was lying,

knew I was the daughter of another,

but I was afraid to ask her about it

The Story Continues on BooksBarbecue!

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