Longing in Nebraska, and: To the Mother of the Sixteen-Year-Old Boy Shot Dead by the Police after She Called Them, and: I-80

Longing in Nebraska

Autumn and the leaves look edible. You drive the awninged morning streets, mouth puckering at the sweet and sour leaves— sugary blood oranges and tart lemons, here and there a cardinal red startling as a shout among the drowsing shotgun houses. Say it’s a town not far from Rulo, where the crazy trailer park prophet made of a six-year-old’s tongue an ashtray, of his tattooed Judas a tanned hide. He paces Death Row, biblical grey beard, pale eyes pinballing. A town off the highway Starkweather cruised, seasonof the witch, death as a teenager dressed like James Dean in greasy jeans and leather, duck’s ass and Cuban heels, a town that thinks of itself as solid, a place like tv’s Mayberry, Aunt Bee and the girls sexless in cotton housedresses, hair frozen into don’t-muss helmets, all that mess of body fluids, sweaty flesh imagined lovers might lay on their spindly or cushioned bodies behind them, made up just a little for each other now, of neighbors who imagine no one needs to lock their doors, where small town Christianity cradles them in its white Midwestern hands. Not a place where a girl who dresses like the boys the girls laboring in factories and packing plants cling to, respite from the smack in the face and beery quickies they know as “dating,” is raped and shot. And don’t you feel superior, though you’re a woman with secrets, this trip one more lie you’ll have to tell, happy to find yourself thinking instead of Rulo, those maiden ladies and their jars of homemade pickles, passing through this town you’ll never stop in, not escaping anything. Not coming close.

To the Mother of the Sixteen-Year-Old Boy Shot Dead by the Police after She Called Them

How could you have guessed he was so afraid Of returning to jail he’d pull the gun you didn’t know He had, or that the cops, young men themselves, Would shoot him neatly in his thin chest, not wound His leg or use gas or a stun gun—didn’t they Do that first? What could you have done but call Them when he broke probation? All that screaming, Fists in the walls, your younger boy weeping As he waited for the school bus, your husband packing His bags? Who sacrifice as your house turned Combustible around you and he slept all day, crawled Through a window in the night to smoke dope And drink too much, pass out on the front lawn At 3 a.m., too heavy, by then, for you to drag him In to bed, his face in the morning so like the one you Knew and loved, so like the one you watched In that second before they shot him, the moment stilled To stop-time, his mask of anger softened into Something you can’t name that leaves you now Unable to speak or move—

I-80

He looks ill, the man hurrying along the shoulder, chin tucked hard into the open collar

of his worn jacket, breath smoking above his head bare in this January wind

that gusts new powder off the buried fields to glaze the shivering barbed wire. Even the cattle and horses

have been put up. At seventeen, my son walked twenty miles of this highway, darkness

shrouding these same ranches, sting of ice on raw skin through holes in his sneakers.

All afternoon I’d refused to come get him from the bar where his angry girl had ditched him,

rough voices and country jukebox in the background, each call more panicked, his car another loss

that year of bail bonds and rehab, the orange jumpsuits of County Correction. Weeks I shopped

for pounds of macaroni and cheese until he said it made him sick—and wasn’t that what I’d intended?—

and paid the rent on a basement apartment...