Breadcrumb #482

KRYS MALCOLM BELC

Every few weeks you shave my head in the bathtub. I sit naked on the wood stool and you stand behind me, cutting so close to my head I look bald in certain lights. The moment after one of your haircuts is the closest I come to religion. In the damp bathroom church I step out of the tub covered in discarded hair and trim my beard in the sink mirror before showering. Samson has been growing out his hair for over a year. For months his bangs have fallen in his eyes and he wears pins clips ties headbands and sweatbands but still wild blond pokes through and through. Samson says he will never have a beard but also says he likes mine. He rubs his hands along my face and calls me beautiful because that is the word I always use for him. His name feels fuller in my mouth now that I worry one day he won’t want it. Samson. I tell you it makes me anxious to think about how different he is from most boys, from our other boys, and you say Well, that’s on you. It is my job to be ok with what I made. He is sweet and soft in a way I’m terrified of crushing. In his little white drawers dresses stack on leggings stack on jeans. There are bracelets and LEGO creations scattered on his windowsill. You wonder if Sean would have needed his leg braces, if he would need speech therapy, had anyone else made him. Sean looks just like your mother. He is skeptical of me just like she was. But what good is the wondering, we know. We know it does not help our children who are alive, so alive, in front of us right now. They are us and they are their donor but mostly they are themselves.

“His name feels fuller in my mouth now that I worry one day he won’t want it. Samson.”

When I shaved my head for the first time everyone was shocked but I did not care. You said you were surprised how perfectly round my skull was. It was the first time anyone ever said the word perfect about my body. Your long fingers on my head felt new and wonderful. You held my hand as we walked across campus, heads turning. The air so cold so good rushing all over my scalp. What did we know, then? Samson says other children do not believe in dads who make babies. When he says this my stomach turns like it did when he was old enough to eat something other than my milk because that meant we were separating. We are separating. Thread by thread I am letting him fall away from me. There are no stories of his life that could begin without me but many that could end that way. I do not like to write about Samson as he is now because I cannot make him a character like I’ve made you into one. You can handle it. I can only handle writing about the Samson who used to smear berries all over his face. You stuffed them lovingly into a little mesh feeder and taught him to wrap his hands around food that wasn’t me. His eyes so blue, like mine, his face smudged all over with red and purple sweet. Samson says he doesn’t want to be the only child on this Earth made by his dad even though I’ve assured him he isn’t, showed him pictures of dads and children I’ve only met on the internet. They don’t always seem real to me either. Samson is older now, holds dark berries gently in his fingers before placing them on his tongue, sacred like. The Samson who needs me constantly is as gone as the me who made him. I miss the way his head felt when he used to let me shave it. So round and prickly, so much like mine. My heart burns looking at old pictures of him. I gave him this wild life.

• • •

Breadcrumb #481

CHELSEA FONDEN

you wanted
a propeller with tiny shoulders,
a fury stirred with purpose, unwrecked
winter light 

did i ever earn the right
to enjoy the fruits
or the labor, participation
trophy lips
and hands like spades

convincing
you i loved you
was like underwater breathing—
a pterodactyl scared and flailing,
picture
the sound that would make

 one day i’ll have a spaceship
in my wallet,
a love
deep-creased from unfolding 

when i recall our monsters
i think of alligator waters,
a banner unfurling
in rented wind

there’s no gingerbread trail, but
what i’m saddest about
is the way you clothes-lined, gray and
giving up the fight

• • •

Breadcrumb #480

THOMAS DISCEPOLA

An Oldsmobile Cutlass and a Mercury Topaz sat in Mom’s driveway, cultivating a world in rot. Their flattened tires spilled down across the concrete, baked to a cragged barren surface. This black desert landscape was full of life -- invasive Jersey Fresh tomato vines crawling up the rubber walls, bay sand embedded in the threads, glass twinkling in the sun. Survivor of Many Offensives, Builder, Black Sheep, First (and Only) of His Name, Father to Three, Husband, Brother, Grandfather (to be) and survived by all, including these, his armada of rust (but they didn't put that in the obituary).

Mom wanted to clear the driveway and revive its adjacent garden since church hadn't exactly inspired the spirit-haunted distraction the old chaplain promised. And anyhow she didn't want the neighbors thinking her a poor old widow that kept a shrine room to her dead husband, like leaving the slippers just so beside the bed as he left them the morning of the attack. So she divided the spoils to the kids: I, the oldest, naturally took the heaviest of those burdens, two unflipped economy vehicles. “Do whatever the hell you want with 'em,” she said. “The Oldsmobile actually runs.”

And I did, whatever the hell, starting with the Cutlass. My brother came along for the ride, driving that once blue hunk of metal back to New York. He congratulated me on the new whip. "You might have inherited the Ding Dong Dealership, but you know I got all the cool shit," including Dad's crucifix-made-weed-stash and a stack of Playboys that Mom pretended to ignore through its 30-year black-plastic-wrapped subscription. (I laughed a little thinking how she might receive the renewal notice in a few weeks and call him a dead prick or something.) We hit a Garden State deficit-sized pothole on the Parkway that sent my brother’s Skittles and Wawa iced tea flying all over the car and he cursed the Governor, the goddamned purpose of tolls, public infrastructure, something about a rat's ass and all things holy including Jesus himself just like Dad. I felt a little moved by it actually and submitted a weepy “fuckin' A, man” for good measure. "Sultan of Swing" was on the radio and I cranked it up through the two speakers that worked. We drove on to New York, bumping along on that shockless frame.

     Goodnight, now it's time to go home
    And he makes it fast with one more thing

Fall came and only one vehicle remained in Mom’s driveway, making room for tomato vines rotting wide open with fruit flies like a gift to the family dog. Meanwhile, the Cutlass sat in an overpriced garage, across the river from our apartment in Chinatown, awkwardly alongside luxury vehicles and vanity plates for three months - three months I hoped to fill with family visits to Storm King, emergency diaper runs at the new Target, weekend getaways to Cape May to visit Mom... I fell into arrears with the garage and waited for the voicemails to become angry before driving it back to Chinatown in hopes of a free street spot. For a week I battled my neighborhood's parking bullies, experts in the waiting game of opposite-side street sweeper rules.

Luckily, I received a callback for my inquiry to donate the Cutlass to Vietnam Veterans in need. "Yes, yes," I said, "the vehicle is still available. It's so cool you called me back. You know my Dad was a survivor of the Tet Offensive!" Silence. The caller said she'd send a representative from the VVA in Philadelphia that afternoon to pick up the Cutlass and leave a tax form for what Mom called “that sweet, sweet write-off.” If I timed it right, the tow truck would arrive just before the street sweeper stormed down the block, kicking up dust and a mad rush of angry Cantonese retirees in minivans. And, sure, I'd feel good about it too, my "commitment to those who served" and all.

“For a week I battled my neighborhood’s parking bullies, experts in the waiting game of opposite-side street sweeper rules.”

Waiting for the pickup, I turned the radio on and caught the tail-end of an interview in which a woman was saying,

...and we do it this way because we can't in real life. Here, we're all going to the      same place, and it's not a good one

Odd, I thought. As an ex-Catholic, I assumed the "same place" people took a more agnostic view of the afterlife, neither good nor bad given its no-thing-at-all state of, well, literal nothingness. In that moment, suddenly, I found myself dropping in on a big wave of guilt and regret for donating the car and wished I could call Tracy from Philly's VVA back to tell her, “Hey, it’s me - the son of the Tet Offensive survivor. Remember? Yeah, about the car..." But it was too late. Time to make some veteran's day with a beautiful once blue Oldsmobile Cutlass, no shocks, two speakers and a Hoffa-sized trunk.

Jimmy, the VVA's driver, spoke in a thick Philly accent like my Mom. I could picture his EAGLES SUPER BOWL CHAMPIONS tattoo under the cliché striped mechanic's long-sleeve, a little name-patch on its breast.  Jimmy. "You might wanna check the car again for any personal effects," he said. In the glove compartment, I flipped up the manual, searching. Beneath it I found an old a cassette of Steely Dan's Can't Buy a Thrill. The album opens with a song called "Do It Again" that Dad used to play at full blast through long rides at night, my child-mind remembering only the scary thunderstorm drives, his joyous singing at odds with the chaos around us. I could hear him through that cassette:

You go back, Jack, do it again, wheels turning 'round n 'round

But I left it, closed the compartment and handed the keys over to Jimmy. "All yours, buddy."

I hoped the next guy to drive it had a falsetto.

• • •

Breadcrumb #479

MEGHANN PLUNKETT

August in southern Illinois & we are drunk
    on everything but worry.  The tin boat we rented rocks
        under our recreation. Plastic wine glasses & gasoline

from the engine casting a rainbow across the man-made
    lake.  Boredom or something more brought us here
        to float on cotton candy inner tubes, a plastic unicorn

with a dumb cartoon eye toddles under my naked thighs,
    flank up to the fleshy sun. Look at how we are not animals -
        our teeth gnashing in fits of laughter,

my two hands crumbling a bag of potato chips.
    What we have evolved to: our lips puckering
        around a neon candy, our sunglasses skewing

the world darker.  & these two rocky bluffs,
    jutting out like an underbite, are a sharp surprise
        in between parched farmland.

When we arrived, a small printed plaque told us
    that the rocks were formed from glaciers.
        Water dripping for billions of years

just to bounce our base music back to us.
    Our small bluetooth speaker humming
        atop nylon & fiberglass.

& the state paid for this sulphur-dry earth
    to be dredged & filled with muddy water.
        Shadows of fish here & there

dumped weekly by Park Rangers just so
    twice-divorced fisherman can reel them in,
        pretending a kind of wildness.

& the birds chirp so loudly
    we think it is the ding ding
        ding of our phones.

& they find us
    large turkey vultures whooping
        down from the cliffs,

& we are blissed,  motionless, a beer bottle
    tipping in a limp wrist– our text messages
        whimpering out now & again

as these birds circles our plump bodies- waiting,
    waiting. They think we are dead,
        or that we may die very soon.

• • •