target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ue01b51a1-e118-5bd8-b35e-3b5fe3b6b332">Fairy Tale In Reverse
Tour Guide To The Nation’s Capital
Holding a dying creature during childhood will leave the offender with trembling hands for life.
— from Tell the Bees... Belief, Knowledge, and Hypersymbolic Cognition, an exhibit at the Museum of Jurassic Technology
PART ONE
SURVIVOR’S GLEE
I strapped on an oxygen tank and dove
into the past, paddling back through the years,
emerging from a manhole on memory lane.
The boondocks were doing just fine without me.
The car dealerships. The trash heaps. The stream
of consciousness where I learned how to skinny-dip
had slowed down to a trickle of amnesia.
All the houses had been gutted, except mine,
where my family was still eating dinner. My parents
welcomed me with opened elbows. My brother
looked up to me like a cave drawing on the ceiling.
The night hobbled by, rattling its beggar’s cup.
A pipe burst behind my eyes, which brought out
the plumber in everyone. At a loss for words,
I placed a seashell on my tongue, and my relatives
wore bathing suits when they spoke to me.
HOSTILE PROCTOR
The only thing I remember about my mother
and the third grade is the afternoon she wasn’t there
when I got off the train. After a thousand shoes
shuffled by, I asked a pair of penny loafers
for a dime and punched out the number. The phone
rang and rang like a slapped cheek. A hundred
briefcases swung past. I tightened my face
and sailed the thirteen city blocks without her.
I pressed the doorbell, like gum into a bastard’s
skull. She appeared, clutching a wine glass
like a passport, a tiny black suitcase under each eye.
I peppered that pathetic pink nightgown
with curse words, until she chased me up the stairs,
swinging a wire hairbrush. Later, I called Dad
at the office to complain, but no punishment came,
and after that, I walked home alone every day.
WHERE BABIES COME FROM
For my eighth birthday
I got a toy train set
my father helped assemble.
My job was to hand him
pieces of track and re-light
the cigarettes that went out
in his mouth. Halfway
through, I asked him
where babies come from.
He told me that eight years
ago today I showed up
on the front stoop
in a cardboard box, how
he spent the whole afternoon
putting me together,
just like this train set,
that I was probably lucky
the box arrived on a Saturday.
THE FIRST ONE
Who knows what led me there — a twelve-year-old,
leading my eight-year-old brother and his overnight guest
into the one clean room of that four-story brownstone
and plunging into the booze while our parents slept.
Maybe it was genetic curiosity, colliding with vodka,
a fifth of cheap Russian, and scorching a freeway to our guts,
as we quivered on the oriental rug, passing the bottle
beneath the fancy paintings that held the walls up.
Consequence was a planet whose orbit we couldn’t respect.
When the clear stuff got finished, red wine came next,
with little bits of the cork I wedged down with a knife
bobbing like chaperones forced to walk the plank.
The room began flipping like a pancake. We dropped
glass anchors from that third story porthole,
transforming the neighbors into a frenzy of phone calls.
Who knows what emotions my parents were wearing,
but whatever they said didn’t make any sense,
as we wiped our lips and spiraled into black.
MANNEQUIN
