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Summer 2004 Issue

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Summer 2003 Issue

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I’ll Be Busy

“Don’t scratch my boob,” she said.
She’s upstairs. I can hear her handle
the one-eyed cat in one hand
a purple tumbler of water in the other.

Tears of the Sun due back tomorrow
Pick up red peppers, rice, capers
Call the defrocked priest
Clean the sheets

“I’ll be busy tomorrow,” I said.
She’s upstairs, folding shirts,
and she can’t hear me.
Either way, I’ll miss her.

“Don’t touch my boob,” she said,
an SUV, stopped at a light,
pulled up high and beside us;
a near handful of her left breast in my right.

Don’t touch me in the car
They might be looking at me
Wait until we get home
I won’t stop you then

“Let’s get busy later,” she said.
We’re upstairs. I can hear her
hum Come Hither
then the song we’ll dance to
at our wedding – The Pretenders:

The reason we’re here,
As man and woman,
Is to love each other,
Take care of each other.

“Don’t bite my boob,” she will say.
She’ll be downstairs. I will hear her struggle
nudging her nipple with her left hand,
right arm around the weight of our daughter.

1. Pick up more diapers
2. Clean the dryer
3. Make her pasta
4. Read the paper

Waiting in Line at the Postal Substation in Ridge, Maryland

Anywhere, at every moment, there are children missing,
their names and faces logged data entry
into the national database funnel and fax:

They looked like this then.
They may look like this now, maybe.

With every passing poster, data clicks
a loop of date equals date plus one,
and the search for that late model
four-door blue sedan heads east.

While we wait to catch the killer,
the mortgage is due
and the lawnmower needs gas.

Young boys often grin at women’s bellybuttons
in mass-mailed catalogs
so what did eight-year-old Johnny Taylor
and seven-year-old Steven Ritchie do
when they found Marianne Leyward
completely naked?

It is hard to imagine a child’s throat cut
but the coroner takes pictures.

70% of child killers
bury their victims in shallow graves,
graves so shallow, grass grows quickly.

While we wait to catch the killer,
the computer needs paper
and the backyard, mowing.

Shelter

Four months, I held my father’s ladder,
mixed the reddish paint pink,
swept the screws away
that summer of fifth grade.

We sat on overturned buckets,
ate sandwiches, drank from a hose,
picked blackness from our fingernails
with flathead screwdrivers, my father said,
“We’re building a shelter for battered women.
Women who won’t eat.”

He sawed, hammered, stood back, leaning
at the straightness of pictures
with other fathers, all looking, leaning

outside, out front,
near the setting cement, slide, and swing set
was a woman standing with a son,
her neck bent,
a handful of nails,
her mouth partly open and my father said,
“Why don’t you touch her?”