Calvarium 2

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Old time-y barber shop, corner of a once prosperous downtown, old fellas talking about the game on cathode ray TV mounted on the wall.  Men coming and going, sitting, standing, paying tips with crumpled dollar bills. So many versions of the naked pate, the scruffy, and the wispy comb-over.  Knife to chin, razor to scalp, going through this mitzvah of voluntary loss as that ancient metaphorical talisman turns on its axis outside-red/white/red/white ribbons of our old, shared story of triage.  Triage or else.

Calvarium 1

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the girl-woman in the kitchen takes her time, cracking the dome of the speckled egg with patience and surgical precision, holds the broken pieces together so that only the white can slip through, the round, intact yolk cradled in the serrated halves of a thing once whole and intact which could have been another thing entirely or…an omelet, a quiche, the whipped interstices of meringue, or these lovely macaroons scooped dough into her piping bag from the sterile bowl on the counter, suburban kitchen, tinted carnival colors, creamy in the middle.

Cathedral in the water

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I see the two hapless, arbitrary, even hypothetical plastic children’s toys descending to the depths, their lovely, efficient tunics, interchangeable hair helmets, ridged plastic arms and hands thrust out marking each fall deeper through zones of habitable waters-here, the last hint of light, here the very last marine mammal, here the beginning of cold and dark and heavy as words we have never know the way he did-“my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  All because something that was always supposed to be

Real

Alive

Heavy 

Has gone missing-reduced to light metaphor and toy architecture, the constant illusory ability to cup thin streams of water in human hands…I am losing you, losing you, mostly hypothetical plastic figure of a child, while at the bottom rests this drowned world–drowned streets, drowned trees, inky human figures curled in fetal positions inside this drowned

Cathedral in the water of

big infinite sea.

Could have been a song

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I told myself pretend it is music after all the women’s voices are poignant, the story they tell is haunting-haunting the way a song might haunt you words very simple, sung to a child go to sleep, child, go to sleep, miles and years and day away from the moment you will remember for the rest of your life-a knock on the door-changing everything.

editing Jen

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I stopped half way through 

Jen’s autobiography

Because things got dark when

The Ouija board killed

The man cleaning the coffee pot in the kitchen

Close to the unnamed laundromat which seems to me to be

A protagonist they used to smoke and drink behind

She was only 13

Don’t-didn’t-can’t-now

Tell mommy

That is when the addiction started…

“We struggled, moved to the next road over in a house outta apt, Tara was staying out all night, got a boyfriend way way older than her”

She lived with her father and her stepmom until Jen was born and she was abused.  Then she came to live with her mother.

“The Monopoly Game at McDonald’s-Tara and I lived on that for that whole summer.”

Other people in the house played a different kind of monopoly game, eating everything, seven people in a three bedroom house.

“He and his girlfriend in my mother’s bed..we did not warn them when she came home…she threw the girl out”

Inadvertently losing both a daughter-in-law and her own favorite bar shirt which the young woman was wearing at the time.

“Mom started doing cocaine”

Lou started…

unexpected

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the fog is lovely, unexpected tonight, loitering as it is prone to do elsewhere-not here though where where it expresses disappointment with the local poets-no metaphors? No cats, no shrouds, no pithy imagery, usually at least a simile or two-Who shrug, apologetic, who doesn’t love a good fog?  Proffering  this instead-early model champagne Cadillac sedan with at least a dozen teddy bears-in the passenger’s seat, the generous back row, lined up neatly, patiently waiting, waiting for the Someone who put them there, seatbelted so that even when the vehicle is motionless, parked, they are prepared for the crash, the collision the

Full force of this unexpected

Fog.

Only a fictional girl 

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Only a fictional girl would walk into the house and not notice the prurient magazines by the front door, alighting instead on the cookie press  in the  kitchen grandma rolling out the dough after it has been mixed, pressed, shaped into a ball and refrigerating overnight derelict old phones and cameras, a stack of games she played with him in her (fictional) childhood, his competitive streak annihilating any possibility of comradery only as she revisits the rooms in the house like so much like a real house on a street so much like a real street 

Where a fictional man once lived 

Father’s Day in Heaven

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The woman at the stilled light resembles me in the shape of her (impatience) until I notice her face, made asymmetrical by fire, some refiguring story, and I think they could be just paper plates, dimes stretched thin to fit us faces, “render unto Caesar…render unto God…

our Father who art in heaven…”

Been ten years  set free of the obligations of earthbound Father’s Day while You tied yourself- knot at the end of this rope of my life. Hold on tight, little girl, kite in the wind, blue sky coming,

Home.

Quiet Here

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Jen asks me why the parenthesis around Badamo(?) and I give her part of an answer in words then spend the rest of the day thinking about how inefficient it is to attempt to distill rage, grief, voicelessness into a slim set of punctual marks.

There was a moment (or a million) after I lost my foster daughter (Veronica Celeste Badamo) when I thought, baby mills (they never cared who they were hurting, I was just a care-giver placeholder, God, how much this hurts)…

I was (just) a foster mother.  Just a bystander, unless heartbreak were a thing objectively quantifiable.

Not just the way they lied to us.

All the children who got taken.

All the voicelessness 

In parentheses.

So irrevocable.

Jen’s Story, Part 3

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Still just editing:

Went to Gram’s, the window was busted, my brothers in the yard…the cops asked what I wanted to do.  Didn’t want to make trouble so I went with him to Florida for a year until my mother had him extradited.

When we came back they got back together!

Later he was in the kitchen washing out a coffee pot and he collapsed.  We had a Ouija board on top of the refrigerator.  Mom said that was what really killed him.

We waited 45 minutes for the ambulance.  Tara tried to give him CPR….