Kin
We ran like soiled sheets
haunted by the wind.
There was kin
we’d never heard of
and uncles we knew too well.
At the end of that scabby cliff
there sat a junk tractor, a
black and blue
John Deere rusting in
the sun’s fist.
One of us hopped on,
cranked hard,
as if there was gold
under the hood.
The other pushed it over
the edge without
saying a word.
*
Seventh Grade
My mother’s new wig is
the carrot color of a robin’s breast,
stiff instead of bouncy.
She hunches over the steaming
oven in our trailer,
topless again, two full moons
drooping during daytime.
It’s been a summer of
forest fires yet she’s smoking
an ashy Tareyton, holding a spatula
with ragu or blood
splattered on the rough end of the spoon.
I have a friend finally. It’s
my first one since moving
to this new park where I’ve
learned there are different
kinds of smoke, all of them
loitering like ghosts with
too much time on their hands.
I feel like coughing
but swallow the scratchy fist
inside my throat instead.
I haven’t looked at her since
she first appeared though
I know it’s almost 3:30 because
the little Pocahontas clock says so.
When I ask Mom if she can
please put a shirt on, I see her
out of the corner of my eye,
chopping air, as if the spatula
is a tomahawk, shooing two horseflies
into the broken window.
Just you wait, she says.
*
Rushmore
We were cemetery kids
unafraid of anything
but our impulses or luck
like how Gordy took out every
car windshield in our
middle school parking lot
that fall when it felt
like summer cheated us again
or how Eddy used a pair of
brass knuckles them heavy
ones that feel lighter
than they look to beat the cousin
his sister said raped her
We drank our beers
cold or warm it didn’t matter
because we knew what others didn’t
that the world was flat as a marine’s high-top
with a drop off ledge that sucks
you off it same as a pastor talking sin
while going on and doing
what he did to some of us
And me I knew I always
blinked too much or too fast when
they asked about my mom how
she was feeling while never
mentioning the bruises or lost teeth
but that’s years gone by now
before the fire and these bars
the bare wall staring back at me
like a headstone someone made too large
like Rushmore with no faces on it
*
Len Kuntz is a writer from Washington State and the author of six books, most recently, THINGS I CAN’T EVEN TELL MYSELF out from Ravenna Press. You can find more of his writing at lenkuntz.blogspot.com
