Two Poems
AN INVENTORY OF MOTHERS AT MOMMY & ME GYMNASTICS
would exclude me but not out of meanness. I don’t think they think that mother equals care, father
absence, the kind, like smoke, that you can smell. Or that there’s something particularly unmasculine
about kneeling down to cup your child’s alembic neck so it won’t snap as she rolls
backwards down a foam ramp that seems to have been made from a clown suit, some poor red-nosed sap anonymous and glum
in oversized boxers and hobo makeup juggling crème pies in the cold of my mind as a squad of three-year-olds safely tumbles.
It’s about alliteration. A preference “for euphony more than truth” (Socrates to Hermogenes), for how “rhythmic patterns
confer a strange sense of wholeness and inevitability” (Louise Glück), and this compels us to condone or do or say things we
otherwise would or shouldn’t. Think surf and turf. Or puggles. Practice makes perfect. Shock
and awe. My god, what a whiff of assonance will let you get away with. A dab of mellifluity and let the stinger
do its perforating dance through any region it thinks needs aeration. Because who doesn’t love
a slogan coiled like a jack in the box? A wallop on a loaded spring, a motto you can’t help but mutter so its syllables can roll
like buckshot in the cupped hand of your mouth? I cup my hand around her neck
and she rolls backwards, spine unsnapped, grin fizzing as she dashes to the trampoline where she jumps,
catching a little bit of air, floating for a moment like a sound that means absolutely nothing
except how it feels to rise and fall and falling, rise.
AMERICAN DREAM
Somehow the lists got switched so now when darkness trips the streetlamps in a single flick I stand on the porch and yell for Operation Total Fury
while the radio announces new troop callups for Eloise. Sometimes, once we’ve gotten her to sleep, we wonder on the couch between commercials if we shouldn’t
have named her Perfect Arrow, after my mother, or maybe Operation Ineluctable Flame — the year’s most popular name, yes, but as the wine tightens its grip we concede it’s got
a ring to it. The news anchors lather up and rinse the war’s many wigs, highlighting momentarily important looks: Genevieve repelling insurgents in the north, Isabel stalled as storms
comb the bogs and forests of the west, and Penelope almost done shoring up the eastern flank so it can rally with Bayleigh and Lakynn, and begin the critical pincer move needed
to relieve beleaguered Taylee. We find the names absurd. Nowhere near as mellifluous as Luminous Spear or Unrelenting Vengeance. Imagine, we say to each other, planting
a victory garden for Winifred instead of Scarlet Trident. Celebrating the smallest inch achieved by Megyn instead of Justice Fusillade. To ration every glittering teaspoon
of sugar and every phosphorous flare of empathy for Mackenzie so this meager plenitude might help us deceive ourselves that despite her hunger her damage will somehow spare us too.