Poem Reading #1: Recent Episodes
Tessa Borrego
Weekdays too my dad would get up early
and put his sweatpants on in the early Washington frost
(the heat from downstairs never made its way upstairs)
And with hands rough as a new canvass from hospital labor,
holding bodies upright until they were stitched back together again
he would sip the steam from his mug
of coffee he made himself.
I’d wake the same with schoolyard complaints
already laced on my lips
and breakfast on the table.
As he defrosted the ice rink off the Mazda
making sure to sit on the side with the one working seatbelt
getting half the answers right to the seven o’clock radio game show
thinking I should call in and win concert tickets
As the red steel body sliced through the fog
and the green lights bled down the window panes
yawning
while he drove in sleepy confidence.
Praying to catch the red lights
that dreaded left-hand turn
not wanting to reach the school
to leave the toasty insides
What other reason, what other reason
would there be?
Love slow like Sunday morning traffic. Like window seats. Like my skin loves sipping warmth from the sun and bad literary puns. Love like grabbing the nearest metaphor and pasting it into a poem because your heart takes up two lanes of traffic and will soon cause an accident if you don’t set up a proper roadblock. Love like forgiveness. Forgiveness like finding out love is a multi-purpose verb. Love like fix and destroy. Love like baptize and burn. Love buried in your pen cap like the dried ink of a story you took too long to write. Love like never saying I told you so. Love easily autocorrected. Love coming home early and staying up late. Love like giving away every single part of yourself that you hate. Hate like always tasting somebody’s else blood in your mouth. Hate not the absence of love, but the anticipation of it. The defense against it.
Follow the yellow brick road
Follow the Day-Glo carpet of fallen fall foliage
Let them sizzle beneath Converse sneakers
While a white picket fence watches,
now a periwinkle perimeter of peeling paint
and promises of renovation, someday.
Let the conveyor belt concrete sidewalk pull you along
Past the elementary school and the wire fences
That sweat schoolyard aggression whenever it rains
Past the best sledding spot, the tippity top Of our block,
where you can look out and witness
Mountaintops dolloped like sundaes with snow
Past the high school bus stop, the shunned sweaters
In an attempt to be cool
Past the streets where you first learned how to drive
Your mom’s Buick that wasn’t half as alive as you were.
Stop at all the landmarks
The house huddled on the hill Shackled with Christmas lights
that tie themselves into technicolor nooses
Yearlong
The neighbor’s yard
with grass as dry as his humor
The trail that always smells like a potpourri of weed, wet dog,
and the familiar cologne
all the dying trees wear.
Remember
there are many synonyms for home
Remember
You are somebody’s synonym for home
Pause
While wind wraps a wreath
of sweet frozen teeth around your ribs
Shiver sweetly.