Abstract
Funeral Pedicure
The voices of the straight-haired nail techs,
syllables like noodles steeped
in quiet broth, are tranquilizers
to this blue and frantic daughter, who has
come to the temple of gurgling basins
and pungent lacquer to polish myself
for my mother’s adoring,
grieving public. At adjoining service bays,
my best friend and I sit like pashas in massage chairs.
Invisible hands push on my lower back
and hammer anemically across shoulder blades.
Nothing like her touch, that made me her child again
and again, tucking stray hair behind my ear.
I must have wept.
The word passes down the line of chairs,
whispers of Mother. Her mom! Her mom die.
The women condole me
with their own death lore:
When grandma pass, she come to everybody all night.
She came to me at four in the morning. I smelled her smoke,
She was in my room with her cigarette.
When uncle pass, everybody come and cry,
then after 24 hour, he come back!
What do you mean, come back?
we had to ask.
He come back alive. Alive!
Sunday Night Blues
One spring night when carpenter ants
began eating the window sills,
the car had a flat and money was short;
papers left ungraded the whole weekend
towered like white bricks on the desk;
an ear infection had my youngest in a vile
grip, and the adolescent boy had a new zit
and a shitty attitude. I was thinking about
divorce and what I had done to everyone’s lives,
when my ex-husband rang the doorbell.
My brief repentance over,
I opened the door violently and
gave into despair like it was comfort.
Our conversation sputtered over the kitchen
counter, but a bluish flickering
and fierce wailing from the next room
got our attention. The TV, blaring
bright and dark, drew us one by one,
first the toddler, her thumb in her mouth,
swaying in a tear-glazed trance,
then my son, striding right out
of that Sunday thunderhead where apathy
and desperation had coalesced into an angry fog.
Finally us two adults, distracted
enough to stand together for a moment.
With her slimy hand, our little girl turned
the sound way up on a Dylan tribute concert.
Neil Young sang “All Along the Watchtower”
from the stage at Carnegie Hall,
and we all had a reason to live.
Satellite Beach
I want to keep going after turning south on A1A,
that hot slice of asphalt next to the heaving Atlantic,
see again the tattered, bleached little towns
hooked together with shells and beachwear,
retail but cheap, on the “Space Coast.”
Driving through the old base housing,
I find the house, the thin-walled box that once held
your mom’s antiques and our own little teenage
headquarters in the middle of your daddy’s air force.
The inland cousin, I came weekends
on the Greyhound, with the latest Seventeen
or True Confessions, maybe a new record album.
Your straight-backed dad was not in Vietnam;
he was here delivering the message nobody wanted,
simple and compassionate. In this world, his tan Ford
was a bad omen, his colonel’s uniform at the door
made hearts pound and throats go dry.
All he asked was no insubordination at home
and a cold Busch Bavarian at the end of the day.
But our brains were blooming
like the weed orchid in the scorched front yard.
Our plans rattled louder than the seagrape trees
on the beach walk between the swollen dunes.
When we were fifteen, all my visits were alike.
Friday night after dishes, we said one thing
and did another. We danced
on lit-up outdoor basketball courts;
Wilson Pickett told us to wait
till the midnight hour. We snuck out,
gave and took escalating dares,
found secret exits, starlit havens, boys,
the ocean singing in our heads all night.
We told each other everything,
and to our parents, whose love for us glowed
like an amulet inside their weary lives,
we lied, we lied, we lied.