EXCERPTS: A HEXAD

June 6 1969 11:27 P.M.

They feast on soft-shelled crabs

in the room above the barber's shop

underneath a bed of peeling paint.

"Once I made love to the mouth of a dancer,"

he brags, taking the banjo down
from the wall--

1/27

Today the hunky-woman upstairs gave
him a nickel for the payphone & they
spoke in unapologetic fragments of their
hatred for the Russians.

To understand him. That's what I
want. And anything but that.

May 13 1992

He sucks down a pack of cigarettes
on the front porch, tells Tommy that
he's escaping to Tennessee. "To finally
be rid of that bitch of a woman."

We watch from the window, my mother
and I, from the kitchen window.

Saturday July 8 2006

At twenty-two
my father is up all night
on Terp. At twenty-

two I light a joint
for him, holding my
paper to the stove.

Neither one mentions
the extra-terrestrial
in the bath tub.


2/1 3:15 A.M.

Marci is shipped to California to have their baby; Chris leaves for Boston, Wisconsin, points west; George fills his parents'  Victorian with reams of paper, iron scraps; Chuck's skin melts away like a dime store candle left to burn all night long; my father dreams of burying his knife inside Scruffy's chest and wakes to find his sheets double-knotted around his thighs and I trace maps for my pilgrimage to Memphis where I will pray on the doorstep of my uncle, an accountant.

July 20 1969

He lights another camel,
says it was his sister
who told him to look for
photos in the sky,

ash raining down on my
mother’s naked shoulder.

Some poet told me that this
would be like the beginning only
with fewer long good-byes.

ON MAROONER’S ROCK

The other boys have left you here, left

you to flounder with ash wood as a fishing rod

on the glass surface of the water. You've lost

your vinyl sneakers. Your tee shirt is torn

at the neck. The calculator face of your wrist watch

is flooded, cracked. You have found no fish here,

only slithering eels, glaring salamanders.

In the distance, shelf clouds press the ruined city.

Abandoned pick-up trucks are throttled with fists of ice.

But just past the rock shelf of the black lagoon,

the sirens wait to shelter you from the bright arms of lightning

that crawl in close across the frenzied horizon.

THE HOME UNDER THE GROUND

Mother and I lived like refugees,

eating from tin cans sliced open

with a dull paring knife, dozing away

the morning on the pull-out couch,

underneath the plaid comforter that once

made your bed (our father, elsewhere,

sucked Camels. In your tree house,

in the garage, at the table of the Great Hall,

shedding towers of ash as he called

for more meat). Even Little Michael started

to fade, like a cigarette burns into wood paneling,

first smoldering black, then becoming another blanched, tarnished knot.

You left us in this Cape Cod skeleton, where we never speak of missing parts—

of lost screws or socks or torn-out pages or of brothers gone, lost out at sea.

Phoebe North graduated from William Paterson University in 2006, where she studied poetry under Timothy Liu. She is currently attending the University of Florida's MFA program in poetry in Gainesville. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in elimae, 2river, Umbrella, Death Metal Poetry, and Night Train. She blogs infrequently at www.phoebeeating.com

POETRY