Neighborhood
She said she was a good witch, though I wasn’t sure.
She held her son to a strict 9pm curfew,
which was one thing when he was younger
but different after he turned sixteen,
then seventeen. I guess she figured,
he’s living in my house, strewing his wet dreams
across my floor & furniture, the least
he can do is lock the doors at a respectable time.
I used to talk to him
at the foot of their driveway.
He wanted to start an online auction company.
He was learning guitar.
He wanted to get his own apartment.
He went to a Pentecostal church service with his friend.
Strangers raised their hands in the air,
swaying to the spirit.
He rushed the stage to be saved.
When the preacher pressed hands to his fevered head,
he felt the devil leave, a blast of cool, fresh air.
He said after that he knew the words to the hymns,
though he’d never heard them before.
I haven’t talked to his mother
since the tug-of-war at the mailbox.
A neighborhood is an anthill, a utopia, a gangplank,
people juggling impulses to love, kill, belong.
We’ve got to get together when it warms up, we say.
Yes, yes, we agree. Last Monday, 70 degrees
at 3 o’clock. Wielding our shovels & blowers,
we spelled our yards into shape. I waved at a woman
who vaped a sugary-smelling herb as the FedEx truck passed.
I saw the father with cancer.
I saw the divorcee, who didn’t want the divorce,
the guy who always looks like he’s
on the verge of making a run for it.
My AA sponsor, a tv actor eons ago,
says life is a showtune concealing a free-
jazz roil concealing a pit of silence. You
never know when that hole will call
your name. It’s like being summoned for jury duty,
except sometimes you get a pass on that.
Madeleine Jones three streets over died.
Navy Jim at the corner lot sold his Lincoln,
bought a Harley Davidson, his
dream, he says, since he was a baby.
Driving to work yesterday, I saw the good witch’s son
loading boxes into a beat-up F150.
I could make out the gold crucifix dangling from his chest,
it’s a shame how he wants to
keep all that perfectly good sin at bay.
*
John Amen was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His poems have appeared recently in Prairie Schooner, New York Quarterly, and Tupelo Quarterly. His sixth collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by NYQ Books in May 2024.
