Ma made spaghetti
every night, to the tooth,
like unrefined grain. And if you did
not eat it, she’d bite her hand and cuss.
Her slipper would connect with your
jaw and you would sleep
bruised, hungry.
Ma’s rules, said Sal, weren’t too hard.
“Come home when the streetlamps come on.”
Well, what if they never came on?
Sometimes my brothers would tell me
to do things without explicitly saying
anything at all. Laced together,
my sneakers, worn flat, hand-me-down ragged,
made a bolas. I gave them a Lone Ranger lasso swing and
fwoop, missed.
I shattered the lamp on the
second swing and Stephen started running.
I knew he’d tell but I couldn’t chase him on account
of my shoes hanging from the pole and
the sidewalk being about a mile or so of beer bottle.
I took a shortcut over papa’s grape wall, but
I slid on some moss and cut myself ten thousand times
invisibly
on the crab grass below. A shower of rich
black pustules pelted the earth. A single
exploding grape permanently alters a white shirt.
Ma was ready with the slipper when I got inside.
I knew Stephen was sitting
just around the corner,
listening from the bottom step.