Juvenile Delinquency
I swear the boy at the bus stop
will never get away with
whatever he thinks I am,
a fucking cunt he says,
kicking a spray of rocks and gravel
that peck like roosters at my bare shins.
Because I’m fifteen, I fork his lawn,
white plastic prongs up,
stick the thickest maxi pads
I can find to tree trunks.
Cracking spoiled eggs
over his mother’s Oldsmobile,
I watch the whites drip,
then streak the windshield,
hands full of the sulfuric stink
of albumen. I wipe them dry
on my jeans, then run
like the devil I am.
When the police call in the morning,
I lie. The cop on the line is reedy, a whip,
a hollow rasp of wanting to punish.
My mother wrests a performative apology
from my gullet when I confess,
though I don’t say he called me
a fucking cunt
because this is my mother,
but I do apologize to the boy’s mother
a breezy sorry like blowing
out a scented candle.
Well, he must have done something,
she says, tugging at a dishtowel,
eyes trained on her boy in a tree,
his legs spread-eagle
between branches as he removes
reams of toilet paper,
damp with dew. I want
to break the bough, to
watch his pasty hands
give up the ghost like
the metal grab of
a claw machine crane
retracting. Instead,
all our eyes are on him
when he falls.
~
This is the negotiation
with the only terrorists
you’ll ever love.
The good lord gives you
one good sleeper and one not,
not that it matters. Mothers sleep
like birds stuck in attic eaves,
thrashing tail feathers against
against the glass panes.
Any intercalary dream
is bright hot and fast,
over before it begins,
like reverse alchemy,
liquid metal that turns
your limbs leaden
and numbs them to sleep.
~
Driver’s Ed
I’m going up, cupping a mocha
capped with whipped cream
and chocolate dust,
and these broad boys,
double file, wallets
dangling from chains,
are going down.
The older boy on the escalator
wants to lick my snatch,
flicks his tongue
through his fingers.
Smirks my way.
The night classes are
at Sears, and so I can
get my license by June,
my mother pays.
I’ve watched her drive
untold hours, but never
paid attention to her driving.
The boy’s gesture
and the word
are new to me, like
tinned fish in a gilded box
at the gourmet grocer,
which are still sardines,
slimy and iridescent,
in their tin turn-key houses.
New to me like driving,
like buying coffee
that’s nothing like coffee,
more like hot chocolate,
all syrup and no teeth.
I look down at my feet
on the moving metal stair,
canvas shoes worn thin.
When I get home, I don’t look
up snatch because of course,
I know. I barely know myself,
but the word, the gesture
I know, like the slick
of my own skin.
~
Cartwheel Galaxy
My son spun flip-turns ass to elbow,
elbow to webbed toe-tops in utero,
buoyed safe in a balloon of fluid.
Now, he loves water more than
breath, circulates breath between breaths,
backwards somersaults underwater.
Overwater, his cartwheels strike sand,
skim tide pools. His torso, a centrifuge,
legs sluicing the air, kicking up sea spray,
crinkled stars in their wake,
iridescent spokes across a sun-pink sky.
He lands only to begin again, arms
indifferent to collision. In the sand
I print the word Dayenu with a stick,
his footprints, small-toed, long-tailed,
like comets streaking language,
smudge the letters as he plants
himself to set up a final turn.
His astral fearlessness,
his buoyant return to standing,
would have been enough.
I hope for the lowest tide, a gentle groove
of sand bars for days, long for him
to find only soft landings, only orbit or lift.
I hope for a galaxy that remembers
gratitude and stores it in space dust
for our later use, our discovery.
~
Rachel Becker has published poems in Dinner Bell, What Rough Beast/Indolent Books, and Heavy Feather Review. She is a poetry candidate in the Lesley University MFA in Creative Writing program. She lives in Boston.