Summer Stock

See the rickety house, the mosquito-fed lake.

Coffee perks up and filters the air.

Women sip their old resentments and talk low.

When the men return, they part the steam rising like stage fog from the grass.

If the screen door slaps like a man clapping another on the back, it means fish.

Children wake from sweat-sleep, tumble out.

See a striper, maybe a clutch of crappies, a smallmouth bass.

Next comes the wooden stand like an altar, the hose and bucket.

Watch the beheading, guts slit and spilled, the boat of bones parted from flesh.

On the cookstove, crisp-frying potatoes and onions.

The lovers trail in, what’s between them clinging like static.

Armor       

What you can’t keep, you can’t protect,
I challenge you. Try to hold the floaters
in your eyes. They disappear like protozoa
we crawled from, or wayward

children—I covered mine in the human
version of contact paper for Halloween,

 a brown hoodie strung with running
stitches I twisted hundreds of pipe
cleaners around; that tedious labor,
a porcupine. Even with face paint
no one guessed what she was,

 a metaphor they hadn’t learned
I wore in a Gilbert & Sullivan
operetta, where I romped as an extra
where no bears belonged.

 My pièce de résistance I saved
for my son; with red shoelaces,
cinched a crab’s bulging pinchers
to muscle his thin arms, to armor him.

 What was given, shrugged off. Even
with candy, both kids sour in photographs.

Putting Your Children Back Where You Can See Them 

Bullets skitter from cobblestones into sky,
from shells into turrets; planes loop their runs
in reverse. Bodies jerk and slump back

into being. One by one, your children rise

from where they fell, viscera snug
under skin, veins humming.

They walk unaware again.

Sky ushers back clouds and birds. Your staples:
bread and eggs, nectarines back in hand.

You are not less than. You are a mother with hunger to feed.

Onlookers, who hid like flies watching,
become people again. Espresso leaps
into demitasse, pastries half-eaten onto plates.

Words waft with aromas; apricots, sausage.

One by one, market stalls unsplinter and fill.
Customers inspect vegetables, intent on
the day’s bargain. Your boy shouts his fury

at a soccer ball, your daughter runs
her hand over a bolt of magenta cloth.

No onlookers point. No planes
begin to howl their bestial descent. You finger
artichokes nubby as turtle skin, mandarins

dimpled with sun. You wave to your children.