J. Kirk Maynard

what’dhegetinto—!

 

The cellar’s always locked. The children have learned the root

              of barbed wire.

 

Because the German man was a suicide, the children are more concerned

              with dark corners where suicides

 

despair. They have begun watching the alleys behind bars

              for the suckling drunk.

 

The cellar door is padlocked and bolted. The bolt is rusted.

              The wood has dry rot.

 

The man whose house it is limps to the door way and scrapes

              the fungus off and limps away.

 

The cellar must have a lot of pipes, the children say.

              They fear the windows.

 

Mrs. Dunlap has begun cheating on her husband. She takes a taxi

              into the city after Mr. Dunlap leaves

 

[....]

J. Kirk Maynard

for work. Sally has boys over for practice, the boys talk of the inside of Sally’s

              room, her television set,

 

her ring tones. Only Greg is embarrassed, clenching his hands.

              He goes to church more. He sleeps

 

poorly. Sally wears muumuus and stays reclined all day. The heat

              buzzes in summer, the fan whirls.

 

A cellar door cannot cave in on its own accord so the morning the children

              found it they knew the suicides

 

were loose. They first went to the windowless bars. Then under the bridge.

              Finally to the shack behind the moratorium, where bones

 

were wheel-barrowed in broad daylight. They stood near the chain link

              and let their imaginations work.

 

One set of bones was old aunt Darcy, another the jilted queer said to haunt

              the park’s oriental cherry trees.

 

The rain-light made windows spooky. The man with the limp never left

              his house. Greg approached the open stairway slow.

Copyright © J. Kirk Maynard. White Whale Review, issue 2.3