Some Drew Horses, and: Dash, and: The Family

Some Drew Horses

The two Kellys whocould draw horsesin third gradeunderstood balance.Their horses canteredacross construction paper.The Kellys loosedtheir small motorskills, and musclesrippled through their pencils.Their ponytails,shining in scrunchies,said Look At Me.No saddle, no rider.When we were older I'd envythe Kellys their beauty,and later still search Facebookto confirm they got fatin their forties,but when they were horsesI was their sky, their poppies,their prairie. On and onthey ran through me,with such authorityit was hard to believe—no, I still don't believe—we were children.

Dash

My worst college job was typing            triplicate insurance claims

so badly I kept starting over,            feeding sheets into an Underwood

typewriter as neurotoxins            rose from the Liquid Paper jar,

obliterating most of the late            eighties, plus I drank after work,

so don't blame me, PJ,            if I've forgotten how to fall

in love—where to go, what to eat,            who pays. After years of teaching

I talk like I know what I'm saying,            but, per npr's Shankar Vedantam,

vertebrates—fish, birds, people—act            with our primeval brainstems first.

Only later do we dredge up words like love, whatever            that means. Last night a raptor

landed on my shoulder in a dream. Way way back            in the twentieth century, Freudians

would mansplain: you're ambivalent, you're afraid,            but gone are the days of the wellangela

padded psychoanalytic interior. What's left? The spine            holds what the mind drops: nodes,

not sentences. Go above your nerve, wrote Dickinson,            Queen of the Overthinkers,

but when she fell for Judge Otis Lord, it hit her—            the dash, the ecstatic erasure.

The Family

Before our divorce my exdealt books, so one yearour basement was suddenlyfull of a dead mob boss's

library—torture manuals,philosophy, criminal law,opera librettos, and of course,Mario Puzo's The Godfather.

Some volumes were heavilyannotated: How to Dominate Others,Stalin's Strategies. The boss,one Joey Balistrieri,

spent his jail terms literallystudying how to be evil,marking key passages.If there's an evil gre, he passed—

bribing cops, whacking rivals,but when I picture Joey in his cell,bent over Machiavelli's The Prince,his neck is smooth and vulnerable,

a swan's neck, as if evil misseda few nodes in back and relaxedinto—if not innocence,then curiosity. Now

he's nowhere mail goes,but if I could send him a gentlebook (Charlotte's Web, maybe?)I'd inscribe the flyleaf

Dear Uncle Joey,since whatever dnamakes us readersmakes us forever family.