A Night Back In Joliet, Illinois

You’d better start believing in God,
said my cousin one night.

Home for the first time in light
years, I’d smashed a girl’s head into the wall

for calling him a cokehead, which was once true,
but from her mouth felt like a shirt

sleeve whipping in the night breeze
that should be shrugged off.

Shame settled like a curtain of soot on a Greyhound
window: this wasn’t the fight Joliet people fought.

They talked about wins or losses as if buying shoes, or falling in love.
My cousin said he needed God when he dried out

in a cabin with his last earnings, when he called
the woman at the bank. She wired him money. They loved.

At forty, even with no cartilage in his nose and planets
reflected in his eyes, he was blessed—

I dressed in armor, charged, blind into a blank
pasture: a miracle I had no business being in.

**

Trailer Park Heart

Quit talking like that. This isn’t Joliet Illinois, said a man, whom I
spoke to in such a way I could’ve only been in love,

and needed to knock vulnerability out, the way you would a rooster, by
cradling under your arm to lull it to sleep

before hacking it’s head off on a tree-stump in the trailer park of
Joliet, because now, I’m back, without a choice:

And the neighbor’s picking brazen, sun-flecked feathers out of the
carcass. And Joan, who cut hair at Classic Looks, Joan

got married too young and too quick, too in love, in a way that’s so
bright and fierce, it can only dissipate like the spattering

raindrops of fireworks we were setting off. Claire, with her nose flat
at the bridge like a boxer’s, whose trailer it was: her first

place she’d gotten with her boyfriend, Corndog, is breathing from her
blown-glass pipe, her hair permanently mussed, her eyes

black with first love. And Seth Sommer’s sitting next to me in
the grass, passed out, his eyelashes black as calligraphy,

woozy from margaritas dyed a space alien green as the lawn. Seth,
whose flannel is rumpled next to him, which

he always wore, which his stepfather would rip off of him like an
excited child’s birthday gift, Seth just dropped acid

like it was a Catholic wafer. And would spend the following year in a
free mental health clinic with a Vietnam vet who couldn’t seem

to put his shell-shocked like back together, and a nun who paced the
stark halls in her orthopedic shoes, repeating

enough Hail Mary’s to absolve the world, that same one, I am not sorry
to say, that I loved, no matter how cruel, like Seth, who beat

Chris Smith like a honeydew melon being tested for ripeness, because,
he said, he talked down to me, and nobody, he said, talked down to me.

This isn’t Joliet, Illinois. Anymore than a conversation should end
with a bold harsh period of my last word: a bullet

launched aimlessly into a golden field, not caring where it lands.
Just that I can walk away knowing I’ve hurt something, done

enough damage to distract me from my own. Back in that trailer,
someone loved me
the only way he knew.

Enough to dent another person, the same way when you love: rip open
your shirt to show them your heart.

If we were transparent would we look more carefully at each other, as
though the heart was a mood ring, or would we take it

for granted and pawn it off on others more, the way we do the world,
until someone makes us suck
our breath in so sharply, we feel
we can never get it back?

**

Midwestern Sensibility

I hate the man on his couch, cratered with cigarette burn holes.
Hate his frayed heavy-metal shirt, hate his beard: the shadowy part

of a garden I’ve flopped down in. Too tired to fight. Too hopeful to
leave. Can’t speak directly to you. But it’s bad manners not to look
someone in the face, just as bad to lose

my temper amid corn pastures that were mowed down. Left our parties exposed as a house with a tornado-torn roof. By God, did we find the good
patches to plant

our glistening keg like a paperweight on a map: a golden ear of corn hidden
in the shriveled field. People sprouted roots. Carved a piece of
inelegant life, smoothed it

into a clapboard home named after trees they cut down. Wonder where
home is, after moving through rough works of lovers: Seth Sommers,
with sun-spiked

hair and hemp. Eight Ball Champ of the local pool hall, called from a
mental hospital payphone. He said he wanders East Side homeless
shelters and that he loves me, the same

girl who came to the pool hall and cut curfew like a piece of cheap fabric—
Who should’ve cultivated an analogy of men and sense-of-place.

**

America in Saturn Return

If what I see outside myself is what I see inside myself, then why I’m
back in my hometown: the scar on top of the bruise

on the auburn-headed stepchild of mid-America, the only one awake,
besides two young men and a bottle of spiced rum we’re about to murder

is because the world inside me is dead. And the first boy, Danny, says
people like me who shy away from war

like a gasoline-soaked door are called agnostics: someone who mucks
through life an emotional half-spastic fugitive survivor

who never fought. I want to disagree. Say I care about infinite
things. But the truth is that I once did: a man in Iowa who wrapped

a scarf of two-tone blue around my bare shoulders as I awoke one
morning and said, that’s your spirit color, that I care about poetry,

and the gods of chance, but that these days, even this doesn’t feel
like enough. And I fear he may be right; that I have misplaced my
passion

like a pair of earrings, that I will never get back. You’re a Ferrari
stuck in neutral, said my father. As both boys begin to pound

the table and chant “USA,” and don’t feel anger ignited in me, I
wonder how long this coasting can go on. Then, Danny asks me,

what do you fear? What do you really fear? And I say, America. And he
and the other boy stop their thumping. America? They say.

Suddenly, I am not afraid to say it. So, I say America. Fuck America.
And because it gets them angry, I say it again, though I don’t mean
it. Fuck America,

I fear nothing except old age and death in bed and America. None of it
true, but the way I aroused these men’s wounded

looks of horror when they could crush me, in a way that’s not sexual,
but more passionate than sex, the drinking, the dimensionless dialogue

that since comes with it. The liberals, the agnostics, the gods, all
of which have since grown old for me as Saturn returns—

a planet returns to earth’s orbit every 27 years, has forced me to
look at myself in a light unflattering, as dressing room fluorescence—

at that self, saying it first softer, then loudly, I hate America,
fuck America. And as I feel the slow heartbeat of the world stir back
up, myself, in love all over again.