& say only, So?

like I was the stranger.

How Do You Know You’re Missing Anything?

When I see a car the same model as the last car

my mother owned, a Dart the green

of a ’70s refrigerator, I remember how,

after she’d gone off to bed, I’d

secretly borrow it

& drive, underage, to the harbor

& beyond, past the mansions along Jerusalem

Way, then up around the cliffs, past the doomed

summer houses, with the sea, every year, eroding

closer. I knew to just keep

going, that there were roads connecting all the way

to Mexico, & that some people did, they just

left, it happened

all the time, never seen

or heard from again. You could wander the entire

eastern seaboard, my father did,

in his woodgrain Ford, the car he one day

walked away from after

it caught fire, walked away while it was still

burning. He left us

or was thrown out, still unclear

which, & we ended up

in that yellow house, with encyclopedias

& Shakespeare

unopened for years,

as the ice in the freezer

thickened, pushing the door open

until the space inside was not big enough

for even a fist.

III

Devil Theory

Ruin is Formal—Devil’s work

Consecutive and slow—

—Emily Dickinson

Seven Fragments (found inside my father)

Fragment #1

birds sing above my bench while the city

sleeps    their chatter

wakes me

Fragment #2

one doctor asks if I hear things

other people don’t

one said frostbite said

all your toes said amputate

but I walked

Fragment #3

before my eyes shut I see the dog-star

crawl across absolute zero

Fragment #4

words come to me in my sleep but they don’t

sound like me    I write

we are put on this earth to help other people …

why don’t you answer?

Fragment #5

shelters,

shitsville

Fragment #6

gentlemen, it’s that time again

& we rise as one

line the stairwell in our white

johnnies, a number

tied to our wrists

Fragment #7

yes, I hear things

Glass Slipper

December 4th—

My father calls so I can wish him

a happy birthday. The next day

he calls again

for the same reason. He sends a photograph of himself

as a salvation army santa, cold beside a black pot,

ringing a bell.

The first time I saw him

sleeping on a bench, sunbleach & chill,

I watched him rise, stagger to the edge of the river

& piss, his cock

wild in his hands. Today

outside The Glass Slipper

he pokes through a trashbarrel: inside

the music ends & a woman stops her dance

to pass through a beaded curtain

& pick out the next song. Each bent note

hangs over the empty stage

dissolving into the smoke & lamé until

she returns, picking it up

slowly from where she left off,

as if she had her whole life to unhook

her bra, to subdue

the spotlight, to step out of

her sequined panties.

Father Outside

A black river flows down the center

of each page

& on either side the banks