Boys, 1998
The boys I run with are bent
rims on rusted BMX bikes
all wonking down side streets,
bouncing in oblong unison,
pedaling hard into curbs like
they might take flight.
The boys I run with are tiny
piles of dollars folded
into simple shapes: a football,
a guitar pick, a shoelace.
To be anything more elaborate
requires more paper.
The boys I run with are sharp
tongues scrambling
loud down the ditch bank, dirt
and sugar sticking to teeth
that chatter like twigs, cracking
smiles innocent with rot.
The boys I run with are slick
wet with spit slipping
from mouths of drain pipes
out onto the creek bed.
A flurry of limbs, then hidden
breath in the damp weeds.
The boys I run with are just
that: boys running. Light
bodies leaking sweat onto sticks,
handlebar grips, flexed arms
grimy, hollow-boned, and buoyant,
not yet thick with themselves.
In Morning
This is the last poem I will write
about death. The freight train
rumbles along its track, tracing
steel veins across the belly
of the prairie, golden and dead
for winter, through suburbs
huddled brick and geometric
south of the city. The dead
of night is scored with screeching
brakes and the quaking weight
of work stopping briefly to rest.
I am licking a battery in bed,
waiting to watch the freighter extend
its rusted spine toward dawn,
for the L to begin its back and forth,
and the highway to fill with trucks,
for my parents to wake up for work
and to feed their dog. I can’t help
but feel that somehow it’s all linked
by these lines of rail and asphalt,
that there is nothing holy on Earth
except the hustle and the hug
of a friend, maybe an ice cold beer
in a moment of empty thirst.
But the sun is warm on my feet
and my fridge is full, for now.
Our cat is scratching for his soup
and you are soft, breathing.
There goes my alarm. And there goes
the shadow of memory, slipping
under the neighbor’s loose siding. There goes
my bloated heart. There goes the train.
