The Second O of Sorrow

by Sean Thomas Dougherty

  at the mill. He is a chorus of children calling his name.

  The blistered hands of a man stacking boxes

  in Sandusky, the long wait for work in Lorain.

  A sapling bends

  & reaches in all directions

  before it becomes a tree. A ball is a key to a lock.

  A ball is the opposite of Glock.

  America who sings your praises,

  while tying the rope, everyone waiting for Caesar to fall,

  back-stabbing media hype city betrayed

  by white people with racist signs.

  I watch the kids play ball

  in the Heights, witness this they say. We will rise. I watched

  LeBron arrive & leave, I walked, I gave up drinking

  as he went off & won a ring. The children’s chorus calls out sing

  brother, sing. Everything is black. Storm clouds gather

  out on Lake Erie. But the old flower-hatted women

  at the Baptist church are handing out praise cards,

  registering teenagers to vote. To turn a few words into a sentence.

  He is a glossary of jam, & yes he is corporate

  chugging down green bubbly Sprite, running in Beats head

  phones, he is Dunkin his donut, he is Nike, witness, ripped.

  On a spring day in Akron a

  chorus of children is chanting his name on the court by the

  chain-link fence. He is forged steel, turning his skinny body into

  muscle, years of nights lifting, chiseling, cutting, studying.

  Watching the tape. To make a new kind of sentence. He is passing

  out T-shirts, this long hot bloody summer he was returned

  to the rusted rim along the big lake. He is stutter-step. He is

  spinning wheel. He has a cool new hat. He is speaking of dead

  black children. He is giving his time. To make the crowd

  sway like wind through a field of corn.

  Does LeBron think of dying?

  Does the grape think of dying as it withers on the vine by

  the lake? Or does it dream of the wine it will become?

  He is wearing a shirt that says I Can’t Breathe.

  They said he was arrogant. I said he was just Ohio.

  He married his high school sweetheart. Bravado laid out

  on the court. No back down, he is Biggie with a basketball inside

  of a mic, no ballistics, just ballet. He is Miles Davis cool,

  quietly cerebral, turning his back, tossing up

  chalk like blue smoke, blue notes, blues. He is Akron,

  Columbus, he is heart & Heat turned to lake effect blizzards,

  freighters frozen in ice, looking for work & no money to eat.

  He is Ashtabula & Toledo. He is carrying so many across the

  river, up through Marietta.

  The grapevines are ripe in Geneva.

  He returns, Man-child, Man-strong, Man-smart, Manmountain,

  Mansfield to East Akron, minus into Man, or should we

  say Mamma raised? Single mother fed, shy child, quiet child,

  who grew, who suffered & taught his body to sing, his

  mother worked how many shifts, doing this, doing that,

  never gave up for her son. He is third shift at the rubber

  plant in winter, he is farm hands & auto parts piecework

  & long nights the men at the bar, eyes on the television.

  The lake tonight is black as newly laid asphalt.

  There are no ellipses. He is turning paragraphs

  into chapters. Long ago the hoop Gods made this deal

  at the crossroads, Old Scratch is flipping the pages

  of his program & waiting high in the stands—to belong to a

  place most people would call

  nowhere, to show the world how tough we truly are,

  twelve-hour shifts at the Rubber plant in Akron. How he is, how

  he is a part of this asphalt court we call Ohio, & how we

  suffer, & how we shine.

  Poem Made of East Sides

  I trace the stitching of clouds in the blue sheet of sky stretching above the long slab of our lives, this autopsy I start with words, toe tagging the people we were.

  Zip guns and the zigzag clothesline across the East Side sky. Your grandfather riding his bike, humming in Polish, Kishka and a loaf of bread in a bag. Before and after the wars, we are always riding our bikes in the rain.

  The only light we have in our lives is the light from broken glass.

  Nothing that is whole is art.

  That woman I passed waiting in the rain, in her Wendy’s uniform, sitting on an overturned shopping cart someone had wheeled from the Plaza, tired of standing one time too many waiting for the bus.

  Scoring in the Safeway parking lot.

  The tight noose along the arm, the pockmarked wrists. Michele, you haunt me lately,

  30 years ago, in an East Side three flight tenement (we used to walk up three flights of outside stairs to get to your room, to get to how many rooms? We didn’t question anything back then.)

  “I think of my mother, the chemo, the endless tests, her pocked arm.”

  The difference is when I see a hypodermic I don’t see my childhood

  doctor, the visit, the memory of first shots, I see my dead.

  I walked by a doorway in Cleveland Heights, an addict or runaway or both, a girl with a nose-ring, the wisp of her thick eyebrows, her dirty dreadlocked white-girl hair, with the face of someone

  I used to hold, a name I uttered softly as the rain falling on both our heads.

  The shine of a stranger’s hand as she reaches towards me.

  The bruises on our elbows and shins.

  We are two lanterns burning our own inexhaustible oils.

  We are the outstretched autobiography of our razored limbs.

  Elegy on the Side of a Milk Carton

  The seamstress disappeared,

  who walked along the road, in her absence

  a space, like the indent in a bed. Can you hear

  her sewing the bar smoke, sewing the rain

  into a pall, sewing the incense

  from the priest’s thurible, or the hands that held

  her shoulders down? And after they were done

  with her, she took like black thread her long hair

  and stitched closed the hole she’d torn in the air—

  Eating Sea Roses in the Afterlife

  When we argued it was like I was throwing oranges at you. You bit the rind of each word with your teeth. In the CITGO parking lot we saw the meteor shower and felt scrubbed by a celestial light. You wore that Canadian army jacket you stole from Salvation Army. Your eyes were overflowing with bicycles. Somehow even though I couldn’t understand a word you were saying you weren’t making sense you were—kissing you was like eating Lucky Charms and watching cartoons on a rainy Saturday. Tell me a story you said: somehow, I feel I am always that boy jumping off the bridge; so cheap this life we couldn’t even count its change. We never shared our food but we tasted everything. I saved salt packages for you in the cup holder of the car. And then there were the bandages, and the doctors. Listening to the wounded rain. We fucked like snarling wolves. I swallowed all of the pills you gave me. They were yellow the color of urine analysis. We lived in a house of strays. There was a dove who sang in the willow tree. You handed me the black bough. You were endlessly I suppose each time all gone. When what you loved you said was more than the far-off fireworks. On the fourth of July. We set the roof, the roof of the house accidentally on fire.

  Down the Line

  Johnny Cash is playing on repeat on the jukebox. No one here drinks drinks named after birds. Bill from the West Side Biker Gang is arm wrestling this huge Dominican dude I nicknamed one brave drunk night El Tiante. They are laughing as they call each other motherfucker. Motherfucker is everybody’s middle name here. Got to move on down the line. Don’t even try to fig
ure it out. The smoke curls like eyelashes. The light is nearly violet. The felt on the pool table is always ripped. Outside the street is full of booms from fireworks, the night sky plumage like a peacock’s tail. I’m watching Harry, who did two tours in Iraq; he seems jittery, bending his chin down to his drink, then squinting and rocking with himself at the bar. Leaning into the two-fisted shots of Jack. It is over 80 proof in here & sweat pours out of the yellow papered walls, with its stains shaped like the maps of countries named Stan. Gotta move on down the line. The Puerto Rican bikers are playing darts & calling each other Puta. Ralphie, in his red leather chaps, is leaning some woman with tall gold hair against the wall. Their mouths melt like votive candles. And someone suddenly opens the steel door and the outside pops in—BAM BAM BAM, & half of us not drunk enough to know better duck. But it’s just a bunch of white kids tossing M-80s into the metal garbage can. The night is a chorus of sound, some intimate & some strange & unfamiliar as some faraway country we left behind in another lifetime, the thatched villages of our fathers & our dead. Vlad the Slav is on his 12th round. He’s mouthing lyrics to Down the Line, when he stands up straight as a statue of Tito, lifts his shot glass of vodka, and roars Gonna get what chu ain’t got, she’ll be sweet and won’t do me wrong. And then the jukebox and everyone shouts back as if they know the only words that might save us, She’ll be cool and twice as gone—

  Our Love as Lead Belly or

  What howling, what teeth pick

  & guitar, chords

  to slash across our limbs

  against their lynch mobs,

  howling what

  homicide, love shack

  south bound steel

  train, fallen

  caribou, rip the flesh

  & feed the blind & yelping

  tongues, in smoky lounge

  this skin, we open

  our bodies & shed

  this myth, finger

  the frets of our necks,

  in the dark den, hackles

  raised, naked

  & discordant

  we wake, like a broken

  xylophone, mixed up

  conjoined skeletons.

  Praise our gnawed bones.

  You Are Beautiful as the Absence of the Air

  You are beautiful as a dialect of glass, as the longest slide in a little girl’s dream. I’m Nobody, but you are conch shells and haikus: asleep you become / marshland full of nesting birds / at light you are songs. Beautiful as the Metropolitan Opera singing Aida, as a full grocery cart, pushed in the hands of the old lady with the green scarf at the Kroger’s, who I gave my EBT card. As the biggest pot of collards, as punching out on the factory clock, as a kennel full of sleeping Siberian Husky pups, you are full-throated dark-knowing, beautiful as scarved women, suddenly rising from the picket line outside of the gated mill, on the last day of the strike. As Portuguese madrigals sung in a far-off cathedral, as painkillers and cigarette-stained hands, on the counter of the last bar open in town, and the neon casting azure shadows on the parking lot gravel, when I am waiting to take you home after working a long shift, you are as beautiful as the stone our daughter finds, on the beach, which is we see a piece of glass, worn tear-shaped and ruby red, you are beautiful as Miles Davis pouring through Bitches Brew, as the intricate threads woven by monks in a medieval tapestry at The Cloisters, as women in their black netted wailing along the ditches, as the joy of my dead grandfather opening up a can of sardines or a grinning face scripted in coal dust on a window by a child’s finger, down at the bus station where we waited in West Virginia, remember the freshly fallen snow covered with our daughter’s imprint as she lay down making angels, she is a grammar without translation. You are beautiful as any gerund unattended, my random winning lottery number drawn.

  Rain, Gas, Boone County, West Virginia

  There is only a roof & one pump

  There is only the dark road

  There is only the grocer Mel

  I hear a man ask Mel

  I’ll take that can of Longhorn

  & his shelves of dusty cans

  Chiclets & RC Cola

  Jerky & yellow-edged maps

  There is only a key

  That someone turns in the sky

  To open it & let the dark pour down

  The mountains are smoldering

  With machines

  Bearded men are buying cigarettes

  I pump my gas in the absence of light

  On a road that belongs to dead men

  I will drive toward nothing straight

  I hand the cashier

  A packet of jerky & ask for a pack of Camels

  I wish I could say more

  I wish I could tell you about the gun

  I wish I was more than a body

  That I was growing that my collarbones

  Were not hollow

  As my grandfather’s before he died

  This man has duct tape on his work boot

  The kind of rip says you lost a toe

  And I recall the dust of the newspaper plant

  Used to turn to shimmering gold flecks

  When we’d work the night shift to dawn

  The light pouring in around the machines

  The silence

  Of sleeping houses

  Far from the road

  I can almost hear

  The snoring of strangers

  I do not need directions

  Since I am headed nowhere

  My mother would say my hair is unkempt

  I haven’t changed in days

  How our lives are rewritten

  Until they say nothing

  That matters

  More than leaving

  As a story is anyone

  We all have a beginning & an end

  The men surprise me as I turn

  Good luck young fella

  And go on talking about some kind

  Of accident high up the mountain

  In this world where a man’s life

  Is worth less than the weight of anthracite

  I try to forget the load I carry

  Is what can’t be left behind

  I drive through the rain’s wreckage

  Despite the evidence my headlights

  Open a door in the dark.

  Gertrude Stein Lighthouse Sonnet

  To kiss darkly in the dark park’s

  parking lot is to kiss the dark

  sparks leaping from our lighthouse lips

  along the great lake’s cliffs,

  warning the night boats

  casting their dark lures,

  down to where even the light

  does not reach, where the bones

  of ancient freighters rest

  below the giant bass

  whose great mouths O

  as they pull against the glint

  of the hook, and rise grand

  and glistening on the barbs of moonlight

  DJ Jehovah

  My daughter & I keep digging in the dirt even after it starts to drizzle. I am planting onions & basil, oregano & parsley. The tomato plants stand potted, the rain falls on our house, on our neighbor’s house, my friends Carlos & Hector the ones with the plumbing business who drink Tequila at night & get into loud shouting matches about soccer games they watch on cable, hitting the patio table & cursing out loud in the wire fenced backyard two houses down. If they got together with my Bosnian neighbor Samir, who likes to drink vodka and shout at his uncles, who likes to kick a soccer ball against our fence, roasting the lamb, they’d realize the only difference in the world is their words, not what they say, some version of jebi si (go fuck yourself) and que chingados (what the fuck!). But this weekday they are at work. The neighborhood is quiet except for the faraway rumble of the 12th Street train, me and Akhmatova, my three-year-old blackgated daughter, are digging into the earth. It is what we do. We dig. Her mother is in the house trying to rest, her bandaged foot, the relentless pain. She needs to sleep. Sh
e takes a pill, she pours a drink. She passes out. What else can one do? It is May. The crocuses have long bloomed. Everything has opened. The air is white with wisteria. Our daughter reaches up to eat the drizzle. She is done digging. The rain is falling harder now, yet we stay out in the downpour, it is washing us to the bone, my shirt hangs heavy as a nun’s habit. My daughter’s knees once black & smeared with dirt are clean. Her hair pressed down flat against her rivuleted face. Our daughter runs splashing in circles, she runs with a palsy limp, she picks & eats the tiny white petals of the wild strawberries growing along the chainlink fence. Can you see her? The rain it falls like melted wax. We are no spectacle. No document to say we lived. We are a rough & ordinary music. The DJ in the clouds turns the records of our lives. My daughter & I, arms outstretched, spin like two turntables.

  Something Lovely as the Rain

  When pain pauses a new world emerges, something lovely as the rain, or like the sunlight strolling in the afternoon without teeth. Or a cracked egg, or a piece of glass. The wind blew your long lashes. And what was fear left hanging, or tossed on the waves. Or should I say bay, we walked beside. The cottonwood was floating. Children flew kites. The schools were closed down. The kites you said, are like lilies on fragile strings. You did not say butterflies. Though the monarchs were fluttering on the milkweed. Despite the heat, your scarred hands were blue crosses. You were not in a wheelchair, we limped slowly along. Every now and then someone would fall on roller skates. What if we ate the wild roses, you said, petal by petal, disarming the silence, the sense that something would happen? Where were our daughters? Even this already seemed like a story. Did I mention we were poor, except for a bag of almonds I stole from the corner store? There was something nearing music, the locusts were whirring. Birds in the sky like Chinese brushstrokes. And you were blooming into nothing that could stay—