Wonderland

by Matthew Dickman

  WONDERLAND

  Maybe children are always

  in training for something.

  Always being told to do something

  they do not want to do.

  Caleb and Michael and I

  in jeans and T-shirts and long bangs.

  You have to work hard for things

  you want

  is what parents say,

  is what the wind says. The three of us

  are skating near the Safeway

  and Caleb jumps

  off his skateboard,

  walks across the street, walks right up

  to this other kid and starts

  beating him. All hands and legs.

  Then he stops. Something stops

  inside him. He comes back,

  a father

  breathing hard, his face like a door slammed shut,

  and crosses the street,

  returns to us,

  some good news

  with blood on his shirt,

  Attila the Hun smiling, skating

  home toward the seventh grade.

  MINOR THREAT

  A maple

  in the middle of all of this, in the middle of what is struck

  and who is doing the striking,

  in the middle of stitches

  and skateboards, of cement and tar and bark dust,

  the quiet of its green leaves

  greening out in the middle of the neighborhood, peed on by dogs

  with jaws like cardboard boxes,

  with owners like box cutters

  drinking malt liquor, drinking RC Cola,

  its leaves making the wind into a body that flies down the street

  and scatters in the rusting front yards,

  the roots

  under us all, moving like medicine in the woody

  dirt. The branches in any weather

  are stronger than all the kids who swing from them,

  who hang from them,

  in the queasy Southeast Portland light.

  MINIMUM WAGE

  My mother and I are on the front porch lighting each other’s cigarettes

  as if we were on a ten-minute break from our jobs

  at being a mother and son, just ten minutes

  to steal a moment of freedom before clocking back in, before

  putting the aprons back on, the paper hats,

  washing our hands twice and then standing

  behind the counter again,

  hoping for tips, hoping the customers

  will be nice, will say some kind word, the cool

  front yard before us and the dogs

  in the backyard shitting on everything.

  We are hunched over, two extras on the set of The Night of the Hunter.

  I am pulling a second cigarette out of the pack, a swimmer

  rising from a pool of other swimmers. Soon we will go back

  inside and sit in the yellow kitchen and drink

  the rest of the coffee

  and what is coming to kill us will pour milk

  into mine and sugar into hers.

  THREE P.M.

  This room of my disappearing act and valentine.

  This chest that’s blown out and honey it’s really OK.

  This record player.

  This bed and all the times it’s been made and also drowning.

  This sea and foam.

  This time I have really gone and done it.

  This time of buttons and pencils and surgical masks and seaweed.

  This amphibian inner-organ green.

  This smoke.

  This pillowcase and razors and salt trying to be a human being.

  This car alarm trying to be a human being.

  This way of thinking and also climbing the stairs to who-knows-what.

  This answer.

  This couch and cutting board and carrots and lamplight.

  This Mojave Desert.

  This chrysalis branch that keeps breaking over my shoulders.

  This kind of thing.

  This going backwards so now I’m like a door in a house you knew.

  This cellphone.

  This two-way calling of the brain’s prayer, Amen.

  This park at night and also yellow lights.

  This scary.

  This sound of someone on fire and also how the body is all water.

  This epilepsy and also the ground opening up and the ground closing.

  SIDEWALK

  My mother worked like a dog

  for so long

  it’s nice to see her

  be the owner—

  There are only, really, one million

  two hundred and ten ways

  to die.

  But my favorites are

  your father drinking,

  your father breathing,

  your father

  touching anything at all,

  your father

  listening to opera, your father

  looking at you

  and saying I see you. Like Pope Francis

  looking at a girl’s knees

  when he was twelve and what made him love

  Jesus lit up

  right as she crossed her legs

  in the sign of the cross.

  Actually there are only ten ways

  to die but I’m too afraid to say.

  I’m brave enough

  to walk home, though.

  Brave enough for the dark

  if there’s a cross in it, a telephone pole,

  or a weirdly shaped tree,

  if there’s a dog being walked,

  if there’s a dog at all.

  In years to come, when you sign

  all your letters

  with your mind only, know

  that someone is alone

  in their bed with a body sort of like the body

  you have and that she believes

  that she is dying. That she is thinking about

  her porous mother

  and Scotch-taped father.

  You go anywhere in the world,

  even inside your own self,

  and your mom and dad

  will be right there

  like two warm eggs

  with a little chocolate and blood

  inside them. I’m sorry

  I was just thinking

  about my mom and thinking about my dad

  and thinking

  about the blue plastic bags

  people use to pick up after their dog,

  because they love that stupid dog

  so much, even though it’s not a baby

  and even though they can’t have sex with it,

  not really, not the way

  you and I have sex,

  with a ball and a stick, calling each other

  in from the dark,

  whispering good boy and whispering

  good girl.

  FOUR P.M.

  I wonder about my brain and how it’s a freeway and also tulips.

  I wonder about your post-structuralism.

  I wonder about your feet.

  I wonder about the time I was twelve and also electrocution.

  I wonder about the faces on milk cartons, 1981.

  I wonder about what I’ve done.

  I wonder about tunnels and bridges and both of them in the sky.

  I wonder about my mother and father.

  I wonder about the oxygen around your mouth.

  I wonder about trees and lampposts and synergy and oxycodone and you.

  I wonder about the hierarchy of Mass.

  I wonder about the sounds you make and also pillowcases and coffee.

  I wonder about what I’ll do.

  I wonder about what I didn’t do and then it was two months.

  I wonder about the yellow eyes of eggs and how you are not a currency.

  I wonder about Justin and how the war is going.

  I wonder about his body being torn apart.

/>   I wonder about the nightmare of my body and the still pool of your lap.

  I wonder about your fingers.

  I wonder about paper bags and clouds and also it’s September.

  I wonder about hospital lighting.

  I wonder about cancer and ginger ale and SWAT teams and their minds.

  I wonder about the moon as an optician.

  I wonder about how time bends and if I can bend it and also you.

  SAINT FRANCIS AND THE PINE TREE

  Before they beat me I knelt down

  beneath the pine tree

  and lowered

  my head and placed my hands

  in front of me like two plates,

  together but lightly

  so they wouldn’t break, just like this,

  like how a child’s psychologist would do

  with two dolls, one female

  and one male, and ask

  was it like this? My hands barely touching

  so that you could draw a piece of floss

  between them, and inside

  the ten-year-old cave

  I had made of myself, I thought

  of Saint Francis and how he forgave

  everyone and was poor

  like me though he could have been rich,

  and how he was always standing

  beneath a tree or standing

  with an animal that lived in trees,

  and how he was kept alive by love,

  and that was what I was going to do,

  I knelt there

  and smelled the pine

  and said aloud

  some made-up prayer

  about forgiveness and that’s

  when the front of a skateboard

  slammed into my face, into it

  but also sort of through

  my face, like a breeze

  made out of wood and metal.

  I looked up. I looked up into

  the arms and stiff green needles

  of the pine tree

  and it seemed like a father

  looking down on me the way fathers do

  though the arms moved like a mother,

  and I wasn’t alone,

  I had the boys who were beating me

  for one, and the pine for the other.

  After that I felt like every tree

  knew who I was.

  That I loved love, though

  I had no real idea about it

  or what to do. I mean

  really what to do.

  And then one of the boys held my arms

  while another boy held my legs

  while another boy pulled down my pants

  while another boy grabbed a branch,

  grabbed a part

  of the pine tree that had fallen,

  and waved it in front of my face and said

  we’re gonna stick it in you, we’re gonna stick it

  up your ass, but was a coward, or he was

  also afraid and so just hit me with it

  and laughed and then some wind came

  because it doesn’t care about shame or kids

  and rose up beneath the pine

  and with it some of the boys’ brown hair

  and the pine tree moved,

  and the boys looked off at something else and then

  followed after it, whatever unlucky thing

  it was, and I sat there alone again

  but for the pine and the light in the tree and the wind

  and I thought of Saint Francis

  and how he might stand up now and hug the tree

  and call him brother for had not the tree

  stood there and witnessed him, his body,

  and so I stood up

  in my rugged robe of blue jeans and T-shirt,

  and hugged the tree, and kissed it, and thanked it

  for not leaving me, and called it brother,

  and then never came near it again,

  for the following summer I felt God walk away

  and chose my cock over sainthood,

  and stood beneath a weeping willow and kissed

  Angela Marquez and took her tongue

  into my mouth and she took my fingers

  into her body

  and the willow moved above

  and all around us,

  it held us and kept us

  until we were

  done with one another

  and then it let us go.

  FIVE P.M.

  I heard the dog crying all night in the car and felt right at home.

  I heard the rain.

  I heard about what was happening in that place.

  I heard the freeway and elevators and landing gears and also nothing.

  I heard I was dying.

  I heard the room when the room walked away.

  I heard the floor when I fainted.

  I heard everything that was left over and also someone calling out.

  I heard the brain seize up.

  I heard about what happened and how it sounded really bad and I’m sorry.

  I heard the call to prayer.

  I heard white linen and floss and dispatches and a single piece of paper.

  I heard dark all around.

  I heard dark all around and a seashell.

  I heard you would never come back and also the moon.

  I heard the moon knocking its teeth out.

  I heard the computer start up and the rice cooking and the groom smoking.

  I heard myself and wanted to cut it into ribbons.

  I heard the party start.

  I heard people laughing at me and why shouldn’t they?

  I heard I hesitated.

  I heard the expression on your face and people speaking in a submarine.

  I heard the men in the stairwell.

  I heard the biting and pulling and curled-up shaking in the bedroom.

  BLACK FLAG

  A nest not all the way at the top of the evergreen but almost,

  rooted in between two branches

  like a tooth,

  a paper bag.

  It’s winter so inside

  no one is home, no warm bodies ticking like feathery clocks,

  just the wind in there, just whatever

  you might imagine, but it’s beautiful

  up there and when I look at it it doesn’t matter

  what I’ve become because the nest is all clear even while it falls

  apart, even as it melts

  in the acid rain.

  Who looks at something empty and doesn’t think about what

  they could fill it with? No one.

  A needle, a body.

  A nest.

  A needle slipping in between your fingers, in between your toes.

  WALKING THE DOGS

  I haven’t done drugs for three days so I name each one after

  my sister and mother and brother and take them

  out with me on a walk, each one taking turns leading, each one the leader

  of a pack that was bred in the mid-

  seventies,

  each leash the color

  of glass and the density of a star, I hold each

  leash like something

  that has returned home after being lost, I walk them under the oaks

  and maples, under the lilacs and cherries, they walk

  through the shadows like the team

  they are, each

  caring for the other

  like I always wanted them to, each giving room for a paw, a tail,

  sometimes smelling each other

  to make sure they are alright, we are

  all alright, the thing that is not God whispers to me, you are

  not alone, you are not

  a shovel or

  a horse, even the stem

  of the rosemary bush is really excited that you have made it this far, see how it shivers

  in the early spring breeze, see how it’s a breeze to be with your />
  whole family,

  to be the porch

  they all sit on after dinner, mugs in their hands and wine in the mugs, and how

  they lift their noses into the wind

  and sniff and look to see

  if you are there, if you are going to do

  what you promised

  to do, if you are going

  to live and call them sometimes and tell them you love them.

  SIX P.M.

  This planet that’s in outer space.

  This way I am with strangers and silverware.

  This exact time and trees.

  This looking past your right ear and at the ocean.

  This piece of limestone.

  This grave I made out of dinner and a bottle of wine.

  This bell ringing.

  This hammer the size of my closet with me inside it.

  This letter I wrote to you with the packet of honey inside it.

  This razor with my family history inside it.

  This room right now and how it’s outside of everything.

  This tired.

  This talking and talking and wind and grass and midnight.

  This ambulance in my hands.

  This is how happy I am with you.

  This thumb and mouth and ribbon and ice and asshole.

  This Sunday.

  This body like any other prescription-filled blue pill.

  This weekend.

  This ghost in your room pretending to be your older brother.