I'm a napkin note kind of person. Pieces of these poems materialize all over, and come together and grow in ways even I don't fully understand. Taking a moment from the blood . . . this poem is still about breakfast.
Oh, and this one has a title already
Q & A: A New Yorker Kind of Breakfast
It was Fraser Field the last time
my legs got stuck on the bleachers
as my father and I watched the Mad Dogs
play like any other baseball team, major, minor
or little league, the game of baseball is the game of baseball
to me he seems so forced as he
sits there in his flannel over Venture Brother tee
his bear hat left on as he eats
his blueberry bagel with butter
baiting me with a pop quiz about hometown bliss
(or piss is more like it)
my banana-nut muffin starts out sweet, but hardens and cakes in my mouth
getting tangled in all the words I want to speak, but don't
the words he forces me to swallow
cutting
me off at the start of the race then
clinging
to each word as they scrape their way down my esophagus
churning
in the acid of my stomach
burning their way out
permeating
into the rest of me
where they explode, taking out other various parts of me
I catch him hacking away all the time
trying to get at those words I tried to get out
all on my own
break
I saw the stain on the back of his jeans as he ordered at the counter of the cafe
I focus on the image of it as we slip in and out of awkward silence, "The New Yorker has the worse comics," he says
I don't take the bait, instead I am remembering that stain,
those imperfections, those unintentional mishaps, those marks on his soul
that only I know, that even he doesn't know that I know
make me in some way invincible to the reality of this moment, guard me against his axe
make me love him that much more
but
he's far, far, far
from loving my mark.*
*I must say these poems lose something not in their forms. I love figured poems. Yum.
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