What I knew was I hated everyone
and I wanted to smoke more cigarettes.
I hated the afternoons I spent in parking lots
or by the boat launch, watching the cars load
with groceries or the trimmed-up boys
load boats onto trailers, how the low
winter sun was unable to muster anything
out of the beige dry grass, the two lane highway
unable to take me anywhere I wanted to go,
I wanted to know where that was.
The day we met I woke in my best friend’s bed
where I had slept for two days without calling my mother,
where I woke waiting for something, literally
anything, I thought, to happen to me. I drove
to the condo where he lived with his mother,
none of the friends that were supposed to come
came, just us two in his silver truck to the small brick city
where he took my photo on the light slanted steps
where, watching him, I thought I might want to
remember how we wandered the university gallery
catching recognition— kinship— yes, a kinship
in each other, in the space between us,
in dust not hesitating, cascading in the high light.
On the drive home, he told me his father
was dead, dead by cancer, which was also
working its way through my mother
who, bald at home, had walked behind our house
into the woods with a bucket of old apples
throwing them, trying to speak as each apple split
against some tree yelling, once, Fuck you, Dad!
The boy’s dad was already dead, and it was there
or later, while we smoked on the yellow beach,
sat in the peeling Denny’s booths or waited
for a movie to begin, the room darkening,
that he repeated it, that because his father
was an asshole, it honestly wasn’t that bad.
Sad, but sad like Bug dying, the pug from my stepfather’s
ex-girlfriend who shrieked when left alone and stunk
from chronic ear infections. Or, sad like axing down
the high, thick tree that would, someday in a storm,
destroy the family house, crash in on the bedrooms,
the couple in their bed, the children tied in fitful sheets.
I knew even then that he was putting something up,
as he must have known that my careful, constant driving
the backroads, my equivocal anger, even
how I bent and opened my sad, red body for him,
that was all something else and he might’ve told me
if I could’ve beared it, if I could’ve beared it
to stop swimming and stand in that drained pool,
and there we could’ve looked at each other,
direct into each eye pooling with what
we had not before then named or looked at.
One of the very last times we were together,
it hurt so much that, whatever sound began
to rise in me, as strings in the pit, or the fox
foaming, calling through daylight,
whatever sound that was he paused his rhythm
and asked me to stop. I had run away to his house,
I still say now, but really I zipped a suitcase,
closed it in the trunk of my car, and drove off
right in front of my mother, who waved, and who
thereafter slept apart from my stepfather,
touching him only for the home haircuts,
which he could not do himself.
One of the last times, it was late April. I lived
there, with his mother, in the condo, slept on a separate
low mattress in his room. It was his dead father’s birthday.
His mother bought a box of pinot, let us have a little, his father’s
favorite, and an almond cake, also his favorite. When we began
singing, I didn’t know whether to call him Wayne, or Dad.
We sang, she lit candles, in her voice, singing,
a high moon, a moon on her face, her singing face.
What he felt, his mouth shut, angry or repulsed,
or something beneath that, a regard as for pathetic,
sick dogs or the pathetic, sick self receding from the shore of it,
I don’t know. His mother sang, I held her hand.
and I wanted to smoke more cigarettes.
I hated the afternoons I spent in parking lots
or by the boat launch, watching the cars load
with groceries or the trimmed-up boys
load boats onto trailers, how the low
winter sun was unable to muster anything
out of the beige dry grass, the two lane highway
unable to take me anywhere I wanted to go,
I wanted to know where that was.
The day we met I woke in my best friend’s bed
where I had slept for two days without calling my mother,
where I woke waiting for something, literally
anything, I thought, to happen to me. I drove
to the condo where he lived with his mother,
none of the friends that were supposed to come
came, just us two in his silver truck to the small brick city
where he took my photo on the light slanted steps
where, watching him, I thought I might want to
remember how we wandered the university gallery
catching recognition— kinship— yes, a kinship
in each other, in the space between us,
in dust not hesitating, cascading in the high light.
On the drive home, he told me his father
was dead, dead by cancer, which was also
working its way through my mother
who, bald at home, had walked behind our house
into the woods with a bucket of old apples
throwing them, trying to speak as each apple split
against some tree yelling, once, Fuck you, Dad!
The boy’s dad was already dead, and it was there
or later, while we smoked on the yellow beach,
sat in the peeling Denny’s booths or waited
for a movie to begin, the room darkening,
that he repeated it, that because his father
was an asshole, it honestly wasn’t that bad.
Sad, but sad like Bug dying, the pug from my stepfather’s
ex-girlfriend who shrieked when left alone and stunk
from chronic ear infections. Or, sad like axing down
the high, thick tree that would, someday in a storm,
destroy the family house, crash in on the bedrooms,
the couple in their bed, the children tied in fitful sheets.
I knew even then that he was putting something up,
as he must have known that my careful, constant driving
the backroads, my equivocal anger, even
how I bent and opened my sad, red body for him,
that was all something else and he might’ve told me
if I could’ve beared it, if I could’ve beared it
to stop swimming and stand in that drained pool,
and there we could’ve looked at each other,
direct into each eye pooling with what
we had not before then named or looked at.
One of the very last times we were together,
it hurt so much that, whatever sound began
to rise in me, as strings in the pit, or the fox
foaming, calling through daylight,
whatever sound that was he paused his rhythm
and asked me to stop. I had run away to his house,
I still say now, but really I zipped a suitcase,
closed it in the trunk of my car, and drove off
right in front of my mother, who waved, and who
thereafter slept apart from my stepfather,
touching him only for the home haircuts,
which he could not do himself.
One of the last times, it was late April. I lived
there, with his mother, in the condo, slept on a separate
low mattress in his room. It was his dead father’s birthday.
His mother bought a box of pinot, let us have a little, his father’s
favorite, and an almond cake, also his favorite. When we began
singing, I didn’t know whether to call him Wayne, or Dad.
We sang, she lit candles, in her voice, singing,
a high moon, a moon on her face, her singing face.
What he felt, his mouth shut, angry or repulsed,
or something beneath that, a regard as for pathetic,
sick dogs or the pathetic, sick self receding from the shore of it,
I don’t know. His mother sang, I held her hand.
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Jane Lockwood is a poet, among other things, from New England. She received a BA from Sarah Lawrence College and is pursuing her MFA in Poetry at New York University, where she is the Managing Editor of the Washington Square Review. In 2022, Jane was awarded an Academy of American Poets University Prize. Her poems appear or are forthcoming in poets.org, Cordite Poetry Review, Poet Lore, and elsewhere. Jane lives in Brooklyn.
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