by Allison Cundiff
I first learned love by watching two parents who hated each other.
My mother clinging to the paperback, the cover torn off,
the veins in her legs from years of standing in that bookstore.
My father clinging to the other women,
their strange bodies in strange bedrooms.
So many nights she washed the lipstick that wasn’t her color
off his collars. The glances between them a sonic panic
that even I, their half-deaf kid, could hear.
When the house grew too loud with their silence,
I walked instead into the forest with the old beagle.
She had watched all her litters handed away,
and she let me follow her trails.
I’d watch the light change to low in the sky,
the waterbirds swim to the shore to nest for the night.
I’d watch the mosquitoes land on my forearm,
watch the proboscis needle under my skin.
In school they called me hard of hearing, but I could hear.
I heard the tritone ringing in my ears, heard the classroom chair
scratching over linoleum, all this over the teacher’s voice.
And when they’d sit me in the back of the classroom,
her frustrated hands steering heavy on my shoulders,
I did not mind. They’d put me back by
Mark Palachek in the dunce’s hat (they did that in school)
and I did not mind like Mark did.
Mark who now works in Chicago and married the too-beautiful woman
as though to say, f*ck you, Sister Cristine,
Mark, all the money he made, for Sister Cristine,
all the cars he drives, for her too.
Years later I asked him, my father,
why he did it. Why did he hurt my mother like that.
“Because I could, I suppose,” he said, guiltily,
the age hanging in his eyelids, the skin on his hands.
“She could not leave me.” And we stood in the rocking boat,
me reading lips, and him admitting his secrets.
At night he stands before his dresser,
taking his keys and wallet from his pockets,
loose change, a bullet maybe, but not the shame.
That’s coiled inside him now, twisted around his smile,
it’s an organ now, an old forever bird on his shoulder
whose small black wings spread wide as it squats on his chest,
all heaviness in his sleep, the white of his old undershirt
marked with ink from its feathers.
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