The Visible Man
He keeps quiet most days;
that’s the only way to be,
the only way to not get discovered
in the scuffed linoleum hallways,
shoved into a dented aluminum locker,
inappropriately laughed at
by the minimum wage lunch lady,
berated by the tired geometry teacher.
He learned long ago, before all of this,
that it’s always best to be
as close to invisible as possible,
to seem inconsequential, to be air.
He knows that’s not totally possible,
less the invisible man,
more the visible man model
in the formaldehyde biology room,
but he does his best to be
if not invisible, at least translucent.
The thought brings him a small joy:
imagining everyone running for cover
at the sight of masticated rectangle pizza
from the humid lunchroom
sliding down his visible esophagus,
cheerleaders running for cover,
jocks and nerds alike losing
their own government subsidized lunches.
He learned to hide from it all
back in his trailer park neighborhood,
and thinking school would be an escape,
he was horrified to learn
the other kids could smell the poverty,
the hopelessness, the acquiescence
on his worn-down toothbrush breath.
So now he keeps quiet most days,
and every now and then,
he gets away with it.
At least until he gets home.
Interlude
It’s only temporary.
That’s what he tells himself
in the darkest hours of the night
when all life feels stagnant
and suffocating, constricting
everything he knew about the world,
and bringing whatever focus
he might’ve managed into a
fuzzy tenth-generation photocopy.
Nothing about this is ideal,
and his wife wordlessly lets him know
every single day, though that is
never her true intention;
her midnights have become just as
bleak and colorless as his.
The girls in the scavenged trundle bed
know it too, though they
don’t know they know it;
only that something that
once was so right has gone
unimaginably sideways since the
downsize word crept its way
into their parents’ whispered conversations.
The ancient single-wide is a far cry
from the small apartment,
government subsidized though it was,
where once the whole family had
vibrant dreams of upward momentum.
It’s only temporary, he tells himself,
but somehow his heart
refuses to believe it, and in those
quiet, dark moments, he finds it
impossible to catch his breath.
an untitled moment
a moment on the outside
of all of this
a breath
a whisper
a promise
of what can be
when the only noise
comes from the wind
and a bird
and your own
beating heart
Scraps
The dog walks the
side of the dirt road
looking for scraps of
anything that might be anything.
Sometimes the kids of the Park
will throw him a bone,
or even a scrap of bologna,
offer a scratch on his head,
occasionally dislodging one of the
more persistent ticks.
The dog used to have a name,
but he, nor anyone else
can remember what it might’ve been,
so most settle for “you”
or “boy” or “get the hell out of here.”
On the good nights,
the dog will huddle down
in the crawlspace under a trailer,
making bedfellows with
bugs and rats and mice
and sometimes the occasional snake.
On the bad nights, he finds himself
curled in the corrugated pipe
separating the drainage ditch
with the small stream running through
the wooded area at the limits of the Park.
On those nights, the dog wonders
in his own dog way, if this is it,
if this is what life is:
barely surviving just so you can
barely survive another day.
In this way, the mangy, homeless mutt
has more in common with
nearly every resident of the trailer park
than anyone is willing to admit.
Belief
Most sweaty, sleepless nights,
she hides herself under the
threadbare quilt, the one
if legend is to believed,
was sewn by her great-grandmother.
There’s another world
under that claustrophobic expanse,
one that doesn’t believe in
bottles and pills and powders
and bullets and knives and belts
and shouts and kicks and bites
and words, always so many words,
none of them ever anything
anyone, especially an eight-year-old
would ever want to hear.
Under the quilt, with its musty smell,
with its swampy heat,
she can imagine anything,
she can be anywhere, and she always
chooses anywhere other than here,
anything other than this.
When they go at it
on the other side of the thin wall,
she wants to cry like she used to,
but all of this is far too familiar,
and she can’t bring herself to do anything
but believe in the world under the quilt,
and what’s going on in the
other side of the single-wide
is that part that’s in her head.
Weeds
The weeds are where he belongs.
That’s what he thinks as he sits,
scratchy vegetation tickling his skin,
all kinds of things, microscopic and otherwise,
coming to greet him with the
hospitality of a pleasantly forlorn landscape.
This stretch of nothing isn’t far from everything:
all those trailers with their thin walls
and shouting at anything but the cause;
the drainage ditch where the older kids go
to drink their fill of a life of their own;
the truth or dare train tracks,
constantly pummeled by an ozoneless sky,
hotter and faster than those worn wheels
screeching their promise to let you just stop.
Chiggers are the rule, but the boy’s mother’s
clear nail polish can take those
angry red bumps to a street on the south end,
where they slurp up and are now only
a little annoyed in a way the boy can forget
on those sweaty, third-hand WWF sheet nights,
those nights when the air through the open window
tastes like someone gave up,
and of course, they all have in their own way.
But out here in the weeds, none of this matters,
because the boy can breathe,
he can think, and when the world moves
in just the right way, he can live.
