History
- History
Anything worse can you imagine the stinkof floodwater children chasing each otherfor a game through green squelchingpesticide grass dragonflies not ever even once closingtheir mineral eyes history occurs at the cellular levelthis or that wet gate thrown opena parade of kinked or otherwise kinked proteinsshuffling down through the centuriessuch that your thrice great-grandmother every peckof sour barley & shame yet haunts your RNA I'm seriousI blame the hard Finnish winter of 1863for over by the creaky swings the skater boys huffing spicethe exclusion acts for the neighbor woman we never seeone night hauled out beneath the whitest sheet& this morning when into bed with us my six-year-old sonslides his small perfect body I'm thinking twenty thirty forty years hencethe wet messages even now assembling falling through arterioles & bonesI'm thinking last night of him not going to bed not going to bed not not notI ripped off his blankets blazed the lights nearly shattered [End Page 340] the damn window flinging it up in its frame you want to stay up all nightfine all right are you all right I ask this rain-dark morning& in answer he snuggles up against me his allotment of lying bloodjust two skins from mine [End Page 341]
joe wilkins is the author of a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, and three collections of poetry, including When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award for Poetry. His debut novel, published earlier this year, is Fall Back Down When I Die.
