Plumbing Emergency in America
like when our pipes burst
and shit-water soaked boxes of photos,
ruining our old bicycles, we are living
through a flood, a deluge of filth,
atop the water we fouled ourselves.
We clog the drain with our addictions
to luxury, loud or quiet, petty cash,
screens, money or what looks like
money while we wear dirty underwear
to the Fourth of July parade.
In Each Day, There Are Three Days
and in the first day in the day there’s waking
one child while I say goodbye and I love you
to another. I pour coffee only after sweeping up
the many tiny bodies of pavement ants we kill
with traps, pack lunches praying for forgiveness,
the destruction of their colonies on my conscience.
Outside, workers are digging up the sidewalk
in front of our house, the early shift,
so I walk through a gravel crater
to the car, back bent from a heavy pack.
The second day in the day is the workday,
the teaching day. It rains inside. Buckets and dumpsters
catch what the roof can’t. The printers spew ink,
tiny flecks like asphalt particulate.
At the end of the second day in the day
I squeeze in a workout to make sure my heart
beats 170 times per minute for long enough
to keep it from breaking. The third day in the day I’m stuck
in traffic on the way to or from dropping one kid at soccer
or picking another up from circus class oh what a circus
to have to ignore this world, block out its news
and consequences. The second half of the third day
in the day is dinner three ways and dirty dishes,
and it’s not like that, my love works just as or twice
as hard, but there’s no weekend in the middle
of the day that is actually three days,
nested like dolls in a Russian granddaddy’s belly,
no “Easy Like Sunday Morning,” no time to touch
grass, threaten weeds with whacking. And no day
left in the day at all, nor night left for love.
Inheritance
The dapper man on the plane drapes
his suit jacket over his knees
and takes a FaceTime call from his toddler,
who babbles over the engine’s starting roar.
I can’t hear what either of them says,
which is fine, not my business, what goes on
between a father and a daughter. Instead,
I start a movie called Inheritance
in which a young woman
spends most of the film running
to rescue her father
from a (staged) kidnapping
and knife wielding hostage takers,
all so she can move a suspicious envelope
containing a flash drive
from one country to another.
My seatmate and I respect
each other’s quiet.
When we begin our descent,
he cradles his head, leaning
so it almost grazes the seat
in front of him. I wait
for my ears to pop, but instead
they pulse. Pressure packs
my gums, my face locked
in a vise of stale airplane air.
When I turn to the man, he’s folded over,
rubbing his temples, eyes watering.
This part’s the worst, he says,
and though I can barely hear him,
I pull out a sketchy bag of pills
from the bottom of my purse,
offer him an Advil. He shakes his head
– I wouldn’t have taken one
from me either— so instead we talk
about his daughter, about mine,
or try to, our voices gluey and distant,
distracting ourselves while we wait
out the propulsive pain.
In the movie, the daughter
follows her dad’s instructions,
every one of them. She’s kidnapped,
stalked, attacked, but she runs
his damn envelope errand.
My father didn’t ask much of me.
Instead, he taped notes onto his office door,
do not disturb unless emergency
but what even was an emergency
to a teenager? The girl in the movie
finds her father in South Korea,
with his second family, wife,
two kids in a lemon-scented penthouse.
The man and I deplane and say our goodbyes.
But we’re walking in the same direction
so it feels like a bye-over, a goodbye
that lingers. The last time my father
spoke to me was fifteen years ago.
In the years since, I’ve started to care less
and less about my obsolescence.
I have children of my own now,
and I understand nothing about him.
