Forgetting

In my mother’s last years
She’d forget where she lived
Frightening for a homebody
Who loved to rock in her chair
Reading in front of the fire
Untethered from the familiar
Like a kite with a broken string

My father indulged her
Tender to the very end
When I was growing up
He never touched me except
With his fists so the last time
I saw him I took him in my arms
Gently like a bundle of twigs
I could easily break but didn’t

*

Nopales

We were driving across the dry plains
west of Austin. Miles and miles
of miles and miles
of cactus

What are those? My son asked
Prickly pear, I answered
If you ever find yourself lost
in the desert

you can break apart the leaves
and suck the moisture I said
pretending to know lots of stuff

They’re edible? He asked. Yeah,
the leaves are called nopales

Have you ever eaten one? He asked
Hoping to catch me out

Oh yeah, lots, I said. In omelets
How come I’ve never heard of them?
He asked. Because anglos
Don’t eat them, I said as if
we’re not anglo mostly

This happened a year or so before
the compulsion, the erosion
of soul began for both of us

We were driving across Texas to visit
my folks in Llano. He’d spend
the summer with his cousin

jumping off the rusty iron bridge
into the river, taking girls to the movies
and driving a four-wheeler over the pink granite
of the riverbank behind my parent’s house

It was Nicholas’s last summer as a boy
my last summer of pretending
to know anything at all

*

Michael Simms is the founder of Vox Populi and Autumn House Press. His poetry collections include American Ash, Nightjar and Strange Meadowlark. His speculative fiction novels include Bicycles of the Gods and The Talon Trilogy. His poems have appeared in Poetry (Chicago), Poem-a-Day published by The Academy of American Poets, ONE ART and Plume Poetry. In 2011, Simms was awarded a Certificate of Recognition from the Pennsylvania State Legislature for his service to the arts.