As the Moon Climbs

A summer gush of rain drove us inside
McDonalds near our school. We waited, wet,
for our respective mothers. Lightning fried
the grid like French potatoes in a net.

How long had we been dating? I forget.
From here, sixteen seems like the darker side
of a new moon. Your father hadn’t yet
done more than hold my hand. Not even tried.

A movie would have had the music rise,
slowly, so you would feel it more than hear.
We’d shyly gaze into each other’s eyes,
lean closer, everything would disappear–

It was a little like that, though the truth
has more sweat, grease, and a hard plastic booth.

My grandfather was silent as god, drawn
into himself to contemplate eternity,
reduced to lobe and chiasm, gland and sulcus.
Enwombed in a red blanket, unshaven, skin hung
like robes on slack muscle, he lay
motionless and refused food.

Stomach still raw and red-slit, I came,
Eve, Sophia, Mary bearing my new child
swaddled in blue blankets. I set him down
next to his creator twice removed.

Slow as a geologic age, he reached out
the crooked finger of his right hand to touch
my sleeping son’s knee. Perhaps some spark
passed between synaptic clefts, a spirit,
life in the void between neurons.

He died that night. In the end, there was
no word, and nothing moved in his house.
In my bedroom, the tiny image of a man filled
lungs with breath and cried, and cried.

Tucked into the crook of an arm, my baby
sleeps after nursing, his face pressed
against my chest. In my left hand
I hold a pair of nail clippers, slide
the slick blade along a tiny fingertip
slowly, so I don’t wake him, under
that pale jagged line of growth,
scratcher of faces and arms. He stirs
as I squeeze the lever, freezing me
fast as a cat in high grass, muscles
taut and trembling with stalled intent.
I breathe. He breathes. We breathe.
Sleep limpens his limbs again. Awake
this task is impossible, Herculean,
wail, writhe, wiggle of arms. Asleep
my clumsy off-hand can barely manage,
barely. Each successful snip means
nothing, for the next could slip,
carve a bloody hole in perfect skin.
His scars are my greatest mistakes.
And yet, it must be done. The bonzai
must be pruned and shaped to flourish.
The gardener can only pray
not to pare away too little, too much,
enough to let the wild tree thrive
tamed by a steady hand.

I have a couple of new articles up over at Medium Difficulty, for the “gamers” among you. First up, One Hand Wonders, about games you can play–wait for it–with one hand. The second is Mythologizing the Gamer Grrl, in which I pick apart the prevalent social “narratives” about girls who play video games.

I also have two poems published in the new issue of scissors and spackle. How many links can I cram into a single sentence? Three, apparently.

To conclude, a period.

As the sun tucks its chin just below
rows of roofs flat as the Everglades down
Tamiami Trail, down where strip malls squat
across the street from sluggish canals
green as the sawgrass on their banks, down
where the dark grows, where streetlights stop
flicking on and only headlights from big rigs
burn a human hole through alligator dens,
I crouch barefoot like a wild thing in grass
warm still from the day, tear blade after blade
out at the base trying to keep them whole
but leave the root for future generations,
press my thumbs together with cupped palms
facing upward like a benediction, pinch
the tip and blow through the space
around my makeshift reed. Nothing but wind.

My grandmother whistles me in for dinner,
two-note rise and fall like another name:
Come, Black-Foot, Grass-Plucker, Dusk-
Walker who carries the light of home, be
with us inside and eat cold lettuce with the same
fingers that could not coax leaves to music.
There is food even for those who fail, in a kitchen
where avocado seeds birth new shoots
staked by toothpicks in a cup on a windowsill, where
old hands rub grains of rice in water until
it clouds milk-white, where black beans simmer
while I climb trees, slow, sugar-spiked for hours,
waiting for me to remember I was hungry,
like grass patient with the promise of song.