850 Bryant
A poem for Sunday
Repatriate yourself! he laughed. Make yourself at home,
feel comfortable. I come from a family that laughs about
conjugal visits. They’re our origin story. My father, keeper
of the broken bells and county jails, moved stacks of min-
imum sentencing laws over so I could have a seat. When
he turned I saw the hump in his back, the bruises from
all the books thrown. When I leave this place, he said,
the walls are gonna fall down. He’d been used to keep the
lights on. In our imagination it would all turn to dust
when it was his time to go back out through the revolv-
ing door. The dust began to get to me. I heard him
cough and felt it in my own chest rattling. I hated to bre-
ak it to him that he hadn’t been the only one holding up
the wall. I saw the empty spot in his mouth where a tooth
had been. Hope was starting to grow stupidly in its place
(as it does in all gaping openings), unfurling and blooming
shamelessly. I turned my face away. He could smell our
lives on us through the plexiglass. He asked me again to
describe how the city looked now from the other side
of Bryant Street. If it looked any different going the op-
posite way home.
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