I can almost see the string wrapped around the belly
of the wasp hovering in the heat, at night I waste wishes
on city-sky satellites. I believed they were stars back then,
men full of absence or violence, I kept repeating father
until it no longer held meaning in my mouth, like a comedian
rehearsing a bit to keep from laughing on stage, my father
hugged me once after my cousin killed himself, everyone
crammed in our house balancing styrofoam plates buckling
under sloppy joes, my dad swishing white trash bags past card
tables and folding chairs in the living room, picking up empties
like lab specimens, rattling each can—this one dead? this dead?
dead? Our embrace was brief and backslapped as the light slipped
between us, seventeen and running to my mother—Did you see?
Dad and me? Years later grocery shopping with my mom, a little
boy cries reaching out to a nickel gumball machine, tugging at his
father’s flannel who yo-yo’s him back behind his checkered curtain
to give him something to cry about, the boy emerges holding hot
pink
cheeks, eyes like crushed cans. In the car my mother’s gaze floats
through the windshield, paces an empty field, her teeth still together,
fists whitening in her lap—Did you see that? That awful man?
