As Long As We’re Swapping Recipes…

Take one perfectly healthy woman. Add a quick white
Volkswagon (reckless 18 year-old included.) Make it
happen fast. Mangle and kill the boy instantly. Leave
her license plate in his tire. Dizzy the woman enough
that she busies herself with pencils and details. Don’t
let her see the boy. Save the wrenched hip and knees
for later. Let her cry. Let her wait half an hour for
help. Give her the empty oxygen tank. Strap her
to a backboard so she’s really feeling vulnerable. Keep
talking in a low voice but don’t admit to anything.
Call home. Tell them she’s fine. Tell her she’s fine.
Lie if you have to. Send as many sirens and flashing
lights as possible. Take a signed statement. Mention
he’s dead as though she already knows. Tell her it
wasn’t her fault. Tell her it wasn’t her fault. Tell her
it wasn’t her fault. Repeat as often as necessary. Add
therapy as needed. Let the phone ring off the hook. Let
her pretend to pray for him. Let her stay on the couch
for a week. Later, make her write about it.
Tell her she hasn’t forgotten how to write.

Years Before I Knew His Infidelity

Every day after Saint Sebastian grammar school dismissal
I rang the bell over the full glass door of Cramer’s
the pharmacy with long narrow aisles front to back, an exit
front and back, and I’d pace twenty minutes deciding,
always choosing Lemonheads. And I remember
always paying
but, afraid of being accused
(as though my pockets might produce some stolen thing,)
I kept my hands conspicuous;
the old lady clerks watched me wearily.

The mix of my father’s guilty look
and mother’s common sense and manners
would have made me an anxious thief. That
and the nuns’ public scoldings made me wait, pay
for the Lemonheads with lunch money.

But later in the dark evenings of baby-sitting
(my name a favorite on the church Sitter’s List)
before the drunk parents came home giddy
and almost in love again,
I’d burrow into dressers and boxes, touch
silky slips in scented drawers, pocket
an earring, cologne sample, or charm, and peek
into closeted Cosmo and Playboy
looking
under the beds of the men in our parish
for the things my father loved.

I Cry for a Man I Despise

This drunk man
whose son has hanged himself
drools on the pillows of my mother’s bed,
drags and scrapes mudded boots
across her doorstep each night.
It is a hard thing
to hate my mother’s love;
it turns to hating myself:
the urge to clean up
after men,
the willingness to sweep and change
sheets,
the desire and relief
in sending children to bed
early.

So really I cry for the woman
who found the son.

He took great care
to close the garage door quietly,
string up ropes,
allow the time it takes
for the mind to swing itself out
from the ladder’s last step,
out into the still air
so the body can follow.

This is the way
my heart swings out
toward my mother in the kitchen,
pulled back by the man
who can’t save his son,
so I am always on that teetering edge
between them,
arced in his hold,
gripping hope like a trapeze,
waiting for my mother’s signal.

Cannibal Mother

I don’t remember her biting my nails
slipping my soft infant fingers
between her lips,
the shift-click of the hardest part of me
snapped off in her teeth.
But she says she did it
with all of us
and I do it with my son:
an act like eating
on the limbs of my child
while he nurses,
his pink-petal lips
at the rosy parts of me.

I nibble on his little corn-cob kernels,
my mouth kinder than clippers,
my tongue checking for snags
assuring no ragged edges on this child.
His whole hand wrapped around my thumb,
I admire the tiny, translucent nails
that let me see through him
to the under-pink places
like shells he brought up with him
from my waters.

It is all so lovely.
But around the time he weans himself,
moves on to the rubbery bulb
of a bottle he can hold on his own,
I begin to use the little silver tool
to do my mouth’s work.
The first time
I miss his third nail
snip the tip of his flesh
and a bright red crescent moon rises up.
He shriek-shudders like the only other time
I’ve heard this wail:
at the cutting of him from me,
his welcome, and his washing.

Now he bites his own nails
and I tug his hands down, repeat commands,
blame myself. She scolded me
my whole child’s life
for continuing the banquet she’d begun.
She lacquered my nails with hot pepper polish,
bargained about ladylike,
and put me in band-aids and gloves.

Yet I am certain I must cure it in my son.
Already he is ashamed, crawls
under the table for his hidden feast.
But he will do it as I still do it,
hungry, our hands yanked like stoppers
from the tubs of how we know
our first love:

pieces of us in our mother’s mouth.