The Neighborhood of Make-Believe
After Tom Lux
We came to your side of town wanting to get away from our side. We brought this desire with us. Carrying it in suitcases. Sacks that weighed on our backs. Talking endlessly about how much we’d packed for the trip. Box atop box we wrote up in black letters. We had walked days. In the rain and the dust. The air studded with fireflies. With stars that had long lost their way. We crossed many rivers. And shivered up and down valleys and hills. Offered bribes to the uniformed. Those who shadowed the alleys. Shaking our pockets free of jewelry and cash. The gold keys for our gold cars. The love poems our parents had shared under moonlight. The flowers they wore to their last hours ever alone. Yes, we’d come to your side of town. Only to find it terribly wanting. In everything we’d desired. Windows boarded up. Doors crashed down. Trees, little but sketches. Streets, knee-high in ash. And soon we discovered, having made too much of it, we were left with next to nothing. Our suitcases asking our whereabouts on such and such night. Our sacks light as insincere acts. Our boxes reduced to the blackness that lurked in their corners. After several days of this we laid soundlessly under where the heavens had been. Curled around a dead fire. Flies patting us down for our papers. And finding not even a sonnet, or fortune, to shed any insight. We eventually broke down. Someone texting our old neighbors. Telling them how we all wanted back to how things had once been. But it seemed after all this time someone had gone and taken our side — on just about everything! It would be weeks before we’d be able to solve that silence. Volunteer an opinion. In some ways, one of us eventually yelling, we’ve sort of won! And most of us then nodding in agreement. Me? I was too lost in thought to remember what it was we’d sought after. But for the first time in a while there was joking and laughing. Lots of smiling for our phones. As the last of our desires, though half-dazed and stalling for effect, said what needed to be said. And then, if you can believe these things, disappeared as if smoke.
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My Mother Looks for Me as a Baby
Calling out in the hallway. Arranging blocks at the front door into my name. She puts out the crusts of her sandwich on the back porch. Sees if there’s bootie prints there in the snow the next morning. She phones the head of the Marists. And offers a reward for my safe return. As much as three cigarettes, a bottle of nose spray, and a funny book about cats. She searches for me in a blue basket. In the cupboard, the sink. Sometimes drumming her fingers. Sometimes humming “This Little Light of Mine.” Last night, she stubbed her toe against the foot of the bed. And has left behind hundreds of pink-red carnations on the carpet and couch cushions. The ceilings and walls. My father tells me she’s upped the reward. To include a handmade sweater. A check for $65. In her dreams I appear on a game show. Winning a washer and dryer for answering the question — “Which Calvinist poet died in 1628 after his stab wounds were dressed with rancid pig fat”? She imagines she sees me while eating her cereal. Dressed in matching jacket and tam. Being jumped on by the neighbor’s muddy dog. I watch all of it from this crib. I have grown much too big. Much too small.