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I.
The other two people whose names
are on my second birth certificate
have very different stories of what happened that day.
My biological father says he just had a feeling--
he was driving around and somehow he knew.
He drove to Cape Cod Hospital
where he was met by my furious grandmother,
argumentative nurses,
and the man who would come to raise me.
They almost fought in the maternity ward.
"But that's my child! I should be allowed to see her!"
He says he wanted just one picture
of my first day on Earth.
Security escorted him out--three times.
I spent the first two months of my life as a ward
of Catholic Charitable Services
before my mother put his name on my birth certificate
and came back to claim me.
She tells me about the umbilical cord.
The noose around the neck of her little accident.
The doctor had to make an incision,
and he hit her sciatic nerve.
Her whole body convulsed, and they had to strap down
her arms and legs, like they do to prisoners.
"Both of us almost died that day."
A stranger's hand cut me loose, unleashed
my slimy pink wriggling.
My first breath was the absence of being choked--
and every breath since.
I try not to take this for granted.
II.
My earliest memory was in a hospital,
clutching onto my dad's leg.
He was recovering after giving
Uncle Stephen one of his kidneys.
Mom brought flowers.
I don't remember how I got
the scar next to my right eye
but my mom says I ran into
the corner of the glass coffee table
around the same time.
From shat I can recall it wasn't long after
that, I ran up to hug her leg,
and she turned abruptly,
her cigarette burning my eyelid.
I screamed and screamed, vision turned to ash.
She said "well, you shouldn't have been running around like that!"
She never apologizes for anything.
I don't remember the feeling of ice.
III.
The second time she refused to take me to the doctor
when I couldn't breathe,
she didn't have the excuse of being afraid of the hospital.
She just went to work instead.
I had to stir my brother from his still-drunk, drooling slumber,
but he became focused, wrathful, a fleet movement.
He drove me to a storefront clinic between Domino's and a townie bar.
As I pulled at the nebulizer he must have gotten breakfast,
because by he time I got back in the car,
there was a paper cup in the drink holder
and he was on his cell phone, screaming
"Your job?! Your job is more important than your daughter's life?!
No, it's fine, Mom. I did what you're supposed to."
He hung up.
I was surprised that he cared enough to be so righteous.
My mother spent the next three hours calling me, repeating
"You can't be angry at me."
"What the fuck are you talking about? Of course I can!" Click.
She must have hit redial every 10 minutes
Until I finally lied and told her I wasn't mad
so she'd stop calling.
IV.
One year, the day before mother's day,
My dad told me we needed to go out to the mall.
"But I already made this painting that I was gonna give to her."
"That's it? That's all you're going to get her? A painting?
That's pretty thoughtless."
"Well, I'm the only one that's gotten her anything yet,
so I don't know why you're calling me thoughtless."
Before I closed my mouth,
my father stood up, and picked up the oak chair
at the head of the table.
The second between the lift
and the smack down on the floorboards
was unbearable.
It was the only time I ever considered
that he could hurt me.
He was storming out as my mother came back from the store.
"What just happened?" she asked.
I told her, and she hugged me.
Rare as white cedar.
I tucked the memory away in some coat pocket
I never check,
because he's gone,
and being dead means you're perfect.
V.
I quit working at Papa Gino's after two years when I was 16,
when I got a job at the Chamber of Commerce.
Dad drove me to work one day in the go-cart Ford Escort
he inherited after Uncle Stephen shot himself.
We listened to Stevie Wonder.
Dad sad he didn't usually like that kind of music,
but the song "As"--something about it, he loved.
He said he couldn't wait until Jake and I were older
and we could just hang out as friends.
"Really?"
"Yeah, I think that's the best part of having kids.
I hate yelling at you guys.
And "m glad you have an office job.
You're too smart to work with food."
Three months later, he would be gone.
He never got to "the best part".
Once, in the middle of one of mom's epic screaming fits at me
Dad tried to fix things by saying,
"You don't have to do this.
Can't you just realize that you're friends?"
The wind of it rustled me still.
"I don't want to be her friend," she said
"I'm her mother."
VI.
Now my mother is unemployed,
and I called her from work
to find that even as we get older
we are never less in chokehold.
The bank froze her card,
unemployment's about to run up
A tree root through the pipes to the septic tank and
when I hung up, my stomach acid tasted
like a last minute prayer.
I took the Plymouth and Brockton,
gave her more money than I could afford,
watched her spit out half a tooth
over lunch, and jam it back in
like a fingernail into a bar of soap.
"ow," she said, so quietly.
VII.
I had been kidnapped, bound,
hooded, in a white dress.
I watched it in the dream,
but when I hit the water
I became myself.
Re-entered my body at the moment
when the ocean became a chainsaw.
I shot up in bed, pissing myself,
unable to stop it.
It had been 7 years to the night
I had the dream where my mother screamed
"Breathe! Breathe! Michael!"
I heard him say "It's ok, don't worry. I'm fine"
My mother said he never responded,
just stopped breathing and then
the eerie lights, the helpful vultures
who swarmed in,
stealing him away, the night's carrion,
to the hospital where I was born.
When I told my mother
how I was kidnapped she said
that Dad always had crazy dreams:
car chases, bandits, shoot outs,
running running running.
But in the week before he died
my father had a dream that one of the elm trees
in our front yard was missing
It scared him so much that it took him three days
to tell my mother about it.
By that time, she had already had
the same dream,
but it was the other tree
that had disappeared.
The Prayers of an Atheist
There are some nights and days ahead for us still--
and so our shadows twist, become oak knots
as the days trim off the scraggly sunlight,
the sky shudders over us like a tired eyelid.
The last bits of autumn gather at our feet
as if to weep and wash them of the growing we've done this year.
Stubborn orange may bleat mild protests from the empty handed trees,
but we are left with more and more night
in which to fight the surrounding cold.
In the blue hour, a Mercedes will creep from the parking lot behind my house
puffing out exhaust like a Black & Mild.
Its windows are sunglasses for a car.
I will cringe for the money counting, lipstick smudges,
for the squeal of tires as the car accelerates,
becoming a shark.
The gunmetal clouds glide over the city;
they are shaped like buffalo,
haunting the skyline with their melody.
Without them, it would be easy to forget
that every day, another world is possible.
My mouth moves silently to ask forgiveness
for the moments in which I became a liar this week,
for the pause while I helped to bandage
the self inflicted wounds of of a young woman,
as she wept at being uprooted once again,
for my mother suddenly gasping for air as she falls asleep
as she has done every night for seven years,
for my brother dreaming, lost in the forest
of trees wearing orange jumpsuits,
for the all the gorgeous hearts of Gaza who I keep imprisoned
by paying my taxes,
for the good people who don't deserve this,
for the people who push against this,
for love, always, for the love of what this living is.
Wind trembles my legs like a good lover,
shakes in the resonance of bullet holes in swing sets.
Every moment sings itself concave in my fingerprints.
Today, it took me two hours to convince myself that it was worth getting out of bed
and most of the rest was spent weeping into the carpet.
I'm not asking for sympathy.
I am telling you what the air tastes like when you stop believing
in the possibility of a just god.
I cannot waste my days blaming the sky
for the way tumors reappear like knot weeds.
Sunrise is much too beautiful.
In Boston last year,
a grown man marred a 6 year old's genitals with cigarette burns
a crime so odious it got 200 words in the newspaper,
and for this I ask the world for healing.
Every day on this earth, mothers, not unlike your mothers,
are raped into submission with rifle butts,
and for this, I implore peace.
The teeth of those brave and those innocent
scatter across prison floors like handfuls of dice.
And what we ask ourselves first is "why?"
No answer will suffice,
No consolation to be found weeping
into an omniscient waterfall of beard.
That which begat suffering which begat this chaos
is best attributed to brutal configurations of neurons
and all the love letters we address to the ugly unattainable.
I cannot hurl the flaming bottle of my sorrow
at the repetition of the sun
and expect it to feel like justice.
I will not beg heaven's pardon
when inertia enshrouds me
and my mouth becomes a desert.
When I've convinced myself I am powerless
to stop the greed machines and the mercenaries
that do nothing but consume and kill,
I can only ask the forgiveness from those
not afforded the luxury of speaking freely.
Beneath the drooping sky
there are bodies indiscriminately hacked
by the blades of those who have spun their stories holy.
There are species whittled into unfamiliar corners,
there are cars, so many cars, becoming sharks--
sleek and swallowing prehistoric graveyards.
Just looking up can feel so much like
the palm of an invisible, enormous bully
pushing against our foreheads
as we swing our puny fists until collapsing.
If I had faith, I would have given up by now
because I would have someone to blame
for our failure to change the world that we have created.
I picked myself up off the floor today
because failing to unstitch my jaw
means I am responsible
for all the ugly mouths of guns.
The Prayers of an Atheist
There are some nights and days ahead for us still--
and so our shadows twist, become oak knots
as the days trim off the scraggly sunlight,
the sky shudders over us like a tired eyelid.
The last bits of autumn gather at our feet
as if to weep and wash them of the growing we've done this year.
Stubborn orange may bleat mild protests from the empty handed trees,
but we are left with more and more night
in which to fight the surrounding cold.
In the blue hour, a Mercedes will creep from the parking lot behind my house
puffing out exhaust like a Black & Mild.
Its windows are sunglasses for a car.
I will cringe for the money counting, lipstick smudges,
for the squeal of tires as the car becomes
more shark as it accelerates.
And the gunmetal clouds glide over the city;
they are shaped like the heads of buffalo,
haunting the skyline with their melody.
Without them, it would be easy to forget
that every day, another world is possible.
My mouth moves silently to ask forgiveness
for the moments in which I became a liar this week,
for the pause while I helped to bandage
the self inflicted wounds of of a young woman,
as she wept at being uprooted once again,
for my mother suddenly gasping for air as she falls asleep
as she has done every night for seven years,
for my brother lost in the forest
where the trees wear orange jumpsuits,
for the small children of Gaza who I keep imprisoned
by paying my taxes,
for the good people who don't deserve this,
for the people who push against this,
for love, always, for the love of what this living is.
Wind trembles my legs like a good lover,
shakes in the resonance of bullet holes in swing sets.
Every moment sings itself concave in my fingerprints.
Today, it took me two hours to convince myself that it was worth getting out of bed
and most of the rest was spent weeping into the carpet.
I'm not asking for sympathy.
I am telling you what the air tastes like when you stop believing
in the possibility of a just god.
I cannot waste my days hating the sky
for the way tumors erupt
when every sunrise is so beautiful.
I will not swallow the thick salt of a divine plan
when the tick tock marching away of minutes
would feel so much like the palm of an invisible, enormous bully
pushing against our foreheads
as we swing our puny fists until collapsing.
I cannot hurl the flaming bottle of my sorrow
at the repetition of the sun
and expect it to feel like justice.
If I had faith, I would have given up by now
because I would have someone to blame.
I picked myself up off the floor today
because failing to act
means I am responsible
for all the ugly mouths of guns.
