Bellevue Literary Review, Fall 2017

Mower
​
​Father
you are the sleeper
 
for all of Tennessee
or at least Whites Creek
 
your snores roving
far country lawns
 
private properties
 
like the mower
whose blade
now and then catches
 
odd stumps   stones
thick scraps of Confederate flag

hitching in your breath
 
or a switchblade perhaps
belonging to one of those white
boys that roved in packs
back then
through the projects
 
perhaps one of those apples
you poached with the other
colored boys
from the white man who caught you
and held up his rifle
 
or the grade school pencil
whose graphite the blonde girl plunged
into your open palm
the black spot still there to this day
you had been teasing
touching her hair
 
or that now-empty bottle for rotgut
gin you barely choked down
to bond with a father
to whom it was water
 
one of three tiny clay piglets
fashioned for your eight-year-old son
by the second wife you met in South Korea
now gone
 
or the stone
flung by that teen that struck the girl’s skull 
who would die early
of a tumor

but not before having heard
eight times
and each time for the first time
the word Mother
 
whose ignoble end
in the poor folks hospital
we get tipsy
to remember aloud
 
I want to ask now
 
what’s catching that blade
is it the hard spine of one more book
about Hitler
 
rustling bundle of legalities
that let you
underaged into the army
 
a pool cue
a deck of cards
for shooting the shit in San Antonio   
Pisa  Seoul  DC
Fort Hood
Walter Reed
South Korea     Germany      Italy

or one of your own
hollow Heineken bottles

and now I see lids
are fluttering open
what honed edge has broken
 
what private acre
so long
can ever be done