Junkyard
The back bumper of my car popped
off easily, the rusted remains barely holding on.
The tow-truck driver tore off
the end of my Nissan like stripping
an aged bandaid from a wound. It dangled
for a moment, a hangnail of metal,
before the driver threaded the long scrap
into the car through the back seat and into
the front, between the headrests, the eye
of a needle. My denim-blue car was shackled
to the back of the tow-truck like the forty-five years
my uncle lived, shackled to his thoughts,
the alcohol, his hot-metal sadness,
until he swallowed those pills and I drove
his car for the five years that followed. Perhaps
watching the frame break, restrained by chains
and hauled away wouldn’t have felt like the tearing
of a thousand bandaids or the stick of a needle-prick
for every fiber if there weren’t still pieces
of him in the cigarette-burned seats,
the coffee-stained floor, the faded numbers
on the buttons where his fingers once pressed.
Reflections
Grandma’s temper shook like galvanized wire,
and her voice thundered through my ears
when she yelled, quick to snap anyone who tripped
in her trap. It was late morning when my mother and I
visited–I was six–and I slunk behind a curtain to peer
from the window at the lilies waking from winter. I turned
to walk away but stumbled over an cord, tearing it
from the wall, the tabletop lamp shattering into kaleidoscopes
on the floor. I cried as Grandma spun from her chair like a top,
then marched into the shade of the lampless room, trampling
in the fractured space between us. I expected to hear my mother burst
like blisters, but Grandma got there first, and my mother embraced me
instead. I saw, for the first time, where my mother came from,
then began to understand who I was still to become.
Fallen
To enfold our bodies, the pressure warm, my chest
beating in tandem with hers, would have been
beautiful. She would have fit in my embrace like a blanket
wrapped around us and we would have stayed faithful
to each other if we were allowed to love, but the walls
of our Catholic school saw only disgrace
and degeneracy. Each blood-stained crucifix, nailed
to every doorway and hallway, spied on me, on her.
It was a building of bricks like any other,
but the Diocese called it catholic, made it holy
and hallowed, wrapped in pages from the Bible, garnished
with the Eucharist, bathed in hetero-love and the love
of God, where I thought we didn’t belong and never would.
The Unique and United Society welcomed me, a support group
whose name sounded like unity but began with the un of unnatural,
its title chosen in place of Gay Straight Alliance: forbidden
fruit in this school, this church. There were few to trust
and compassion was almost impossible when I lied
to myself and others and God, to protect a cracking truth
that would have exposed what I didn’t dare let people see.
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