& I say, suicide, & you ask

how & I say, an overdose, and then

she shot herself,

& your eyes fill with what?

wonder? so I add, in the chest,

so you won’t think

her face is gone, & it matters somehow

that you know this…

& near the end I

eat all her percodans, to know

how far they can take me, because

they are there. So she

won’t. Cut straws

stashed in her glove compartment,

& I split them open

to taste the alkaloid residue. Bitter.

Lingering. A bottle of red wine

moves each night along

as she writes, I feel too much,

again & again. Our phone now

unlisted, our mail

kept in a box at the post office

& my mother tells me to always leave

a light on so it seems

someone’s home. She finds a cop

for her next boyfriend, his hair

greasy, pushed back with his fingers.

He lets me play with his service revolver

while they kiss on the couch.

As cars fill the windows, I aim,

making the noise with my mouth,

in case it’s them,

& when his back is hunched over her I aim

between his shoulder blades,

in case it’s him.

1967

I distrust the men who come at night, sitting in their cars, their

engines running.

The living room a dark theater behind me, I watch from the curtained

window.

My mother is twenty-seven.

She opens the car door & bends into the overhead light but before his lips

can graze her cheek the door closes

& the light goes out.

They sit inside & fill it with smoke.

It looks creamy in the winter night, like amber, or a newfound galaxy.

I know cigarettes can kill & wonder why she wants to die.

A picture book teaches me how to vanish. All the children are monkeys.

They plunge into the icy sea each morning to become strong.

My mother buys a Harley & I cling to her past blurry lawns.

We walk out of Bonnie & Clyde after Gene Hackman staggers up dead.

We listen for fire bells & drive to the scene of burning houses, to stand

close to tragedy.

The Greeks teach me to shout into the waves so people will listen.

Trickology

She’d screw a store-bought toy head,

a water-wiggle, onto the end of the green hose,

that made it & me go softly berserk

twisting across the summer lawn

as if air itself were valium.

she could whisper the word burn

& I’d turn to ash

A blackberry patch grew wild off the road

to the electric transformers.

I’d fill my hat & carry them home

for her to make a lattice pie. Now she tells me

that she doesn’t know how to bake, that

no blackberries ever grew around us,

that I never ate pie anyway.

not ash, really,

but the bright flecks rising from a burning

house, the family outside,

barefoot

The Visible Woman

In the dark museum we see the pump of her heart, brightening with each