CHAPTER II. WHAT ARE GENTLE MEASURES?

For the occasion she learns she will have no father

my Sri Lankan child will have to imagine, difficult as it is,

the depth of history, how humanity endures because it is,

at most, an idea. This scenario is also for my mother flirting

with a man twice her age and for the lonely child in me.

CHAPTER III. THERE MUST BE AUTHORITY

I will have a son named High Jinx, and a son named 44,

and a son named Mary. Some of my sons will wear bags

on their heads. Some of my sons will wait their whole lives

to board an ark called American Beauty.

CHAPTER IV. GENTLE PUNISHMENT OF DISOBEDIENCE

Mothers, various retributions should be divvied in the light

of each child’s sins. My children will not always be godly.

You have my permission to punish them as you would like

to punish me. (Your hands and knees must be bloodied.)

CHAPTER V. THE PHILOSOPHY OF PUNISHMENT

I would like to abandon the child of a mother who dies

in a Luxembourg train wreck, and a mother kidnapped

by banana farmers in Belize; a mother taking refuge

alone in a mountain cave during a Peruvian flood.

Goddamn, I want to be as hardcore as my daddy.

CHAPTER VI. REWARDING OBEDIENCE

Thinking of me, two or three myths their brains devise

will begin to divide in them, the tangible cells untangling

themselves until my absence seems to recede. My children

will find grease on their fingers after touching pictures of me.

CHAPTER VII. THE ART OF TRAINING

Sometimes I want to catch the hand of a child and go

“Life! Life! Life!” Sometimes I imagine an old naked woman waiting

as her tub fills with water. Or a knock-kneed girl using her face

as a shield. But I will not claim to know other people’s loneliness.

CHAPTER VIII. DELLA AND THE DOLLS

When my Korean daughter falls for the man who dresses

his lovers like dolls, I will not be there to say, “Being a doll

is as close as a toy can come to slavery,” I will not say, “Isn’t it

exciting: the noon teas, the personalized songs and cradling?”

CHAPTER IX. METHODS EXEMPLIFIED

Children, here are some of my favorite things: the tiny tongue

painted inside a doll’s tiny mouth, a phonograph record

spinning like a girl in a black skirt. Also the family drawing

one of you made, though the father in it looks nothing like me.

CHAPTER X. SYMPATHY:—I. THE CHILD WITH THE PARENT

My little Belgian boy in a hat decorated with buttons

pulled from the shirt I left behind, my little Syrian girl

with a shoe box waiting for birthday cards she will not receive,

my farm boy with the tomatoes he tried selling to neighbors

who wanted pears. I plan to never keep photographs of them.

CHAPTER XI. SYMPATHY:—II. THE PARENT WITH THE CHILD

My mother had me when she was sixteen. The angle of her teeth,