SHOUT(29)

whose mommy broke up with that boyfriend but now they have to live in their car





adaptable heart




   the names of the charred survivors

   who don’t know how fucking tough

   they are

   nestle

   hidden

   in the fifth chamber

   of my heart.

   Their courage warms

   me from the inside,

   stubborn candles

   illuminating

   this scorched

   pumpkin.





three





my peculiar condition arboreal




After they stole the mountains from the Mohawks and thrashed the British, my grandfather’s people tapped sugar maple trees, generations of us bled maple sap, wearing tamarack snowshoes, under a late winter moon spring urges rising, boiling

gallons of sap in iron vats

sold it cheap to neighbors, jacked the price for outsiders who vacationed in the woods where my grandfather roamed, ax and rifle at the ready.

A quiet forest ranger

he taught me how to listen to the pine, broad oak, woeful elm, sistering beeches, spruce and fir for Christmas trees and ironwood for fences

miles of paper birch tattooing memory on their skin with black walnut ink he gently pressed my palms

against the bark

so I could feel their whispers.





Ganoderma applanatum




Ganoderma applanatum is a fancy way of saying the fungus you find on some trees in the North, a boil, canker sore, wide as a working man’s hand, a worry bursting from the hip of an uprighteous beech

skyside watertight, wind-thick, wood-tough bird-stained, blight-wrinkled folding over and over on herself like a slow-growing mountain or a hand-forged sword

earthside, underside, dirtside clean as a patient page

waiting

for a dreamer

to make her mark





sweet gum tree, felled




Ernest Boy Scout troop awkwardly erecting small flags, blue and gold, on deadfall

branches propped upright

with rocks, while a white-haired woman cooks the boys’ dinner over an open fire, white-haired man sharpening a chainsaw with a rat-tail file, properly, with long, smooth strokes,

echoes of his wife, slowly stirring the pot.

The other men? Troop masters and dadfriends slump-dressed for Saturday, clustered coffeeing, watching one of their own revving the other chainsaw, two-stroke oil smoking, blade deadly dull and ready to kick, hungry for legs, not wood, but this dad-dude is clueless in sneakers, not boots, blind to his need for protection, so damn tough he leaves his headphones on the stump, safety glasses, too. He squeezes the trigger and the chain spins faster, motor screams, oil smokes, and the other men lean into the illusion of power

becoming more deaf

by the minute. But the saw, it sticks, bucks, won’t cut right, so the dad-dudes complain and curse the machinery,

glancing at their phones.

The boys who pledge their allegiance openhearted play

with sticks and stones

watching close.

The white-haired man, finally satisfied puts down his tools, while the white-haired woman

in steel-toed boots

puts on her safety glasses and headphones.

She starts the chainsaw with a single pull looks at the old man, her husband or lover, and he grins, knowing what comes next; the old woman saws through expectations and the sweet gum trunk like butter, wood chips spitting at the openmouthed dad-dudes unable

to process the sight.





piccolo




She hated being a six-foot-tall woman in 1947, a freak of nature in a town without a circus.

The class picture that year, organized by height shows four tall boys, my Amazonian mother then another twenty dudes, all smaller.

She wanted to play the piccolo or at least the flute, delicate instruments elegant, feminine testaments to belie her size but the director gave her the trombone cuz she

had the longest arms in the band.

She hunched, slouched with panache, tried to shrink herself down to the size of other girls, origami-folded herself in upon herself, accidentally forging a backbone that twisted

and misaligned her hips.

After days at school reducing her frame and presence to blend into the bland expanse of North Country expectations, my mother would go home and cross paths with her father, who wouldn’t stand for his girl to bow to the will of others he forced her to stand tall erect

against the wall of the living room for an hour each night, shoulders back far enough to kiss the wallpaper, her chin lifted, tears pearling, the ache intended to remind her never to bend to the whims

of the small-minded

She hated every minute, but she taught me the same way, and when my daughters shot up and towered over us both

their long arms, strong hands snatching basketballs and softballs, playing trumpet, slamming gavels,

leaping over mountains and storming castle walls, my mother rested in their shade and finally relaxed

into the shape of her own satisfaction.





lost boys




My mother’s last supper was homemade mac and cheese.