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a fight for air




Edward Mycue





I. A Fight for Air

Towels soak in the sink
Roots crack, splinter

Each sound’s a stone screaming
successive millions
of mute islands
a secret care I keep folded
under my fingernail
dawn after dawn

The thrill is uneven
The saliva curdles
Sunset climbs closely
to the fight for air.

II. Buried World

The Great River
plains desert
Red Rock Red River
Gulf of Mexico
deltas bayous hill country
conscribe an end and a beginning, leading
from these years this journey back
to nineteen sixty-one
Dallas: blotch concrete spread out on the plains.

We’d come to Texas thirteen years before
in a slope-back forties Ford.
I was eleven then.

We’d pass through Erie, Kentucky, Delta States
to arid, fissured land and bottomland and floods
to dying apple trees.

Then summertimes
and othertimes
Dad took us with him one by one
to get to know us
on his travels through his Southwest territory,
him talking brakelinings for a Firestone subsidiary
company that let him go not long before he died
in a chaos of fear
and pain he said was not like pain
but was pulling him apart.

III. Father

“We brought our children from New York
to take a better job.
My wife supported me.
Her hair turned white that first year.
She was thirty-three, had borne us seven kids
in our hometown, Niagara Falls. Through all
we fought and stayed together
pounding with our love.

I was thirty-six that year
nineteen forty-eight.
Our oldest son was twelve.
The baby was a year.”

IV. Rain

Starting
��Caution
��Stop
��Signal
��Passing
��Being passed
My father seems beautiful
his geographical eyes a cage
of ocean dreams
who’ll never dream again
so stubborn, gentle, singing anytime
some snatch of song he’ll never sing again.

Nostrils flaring, lungs honking, at the end
he couldn’t hold his teeth
only wanted air Air
His food came back
I hear him say NO, No not pain I’m
falling

No steel,
green-painted, rented tank of oxygen could help
since death will come when cancer eats the brain.

It rained the day he died
and it rained again on burial day (Good Luck,
it’s angels’ tears, they say the Irish say.)

The dog killed cat run off morphene soaking into sand.
Gigantic stones snakes apple trees his eyes.

V. Grave Song

End of night
melted
threw my heat in the fire
O my mama place in the white
it was too big for me
I wanted out out I got out
��Go downstairs
say of wiz de light off wiz all de lights
��up up up
up wiz de fire up wiz de fire
(say UP with the fire)
��I am afraid
of the door rats on the stairs miles
miles miles to the light and I can’t
��say it
��there’s only me
��and and everybody
and that is no body nobody
��but some thing
��behind
Lock it! Lock it!
��Go go downstairs
Run Run Run Run out out out
��They are moving
��Dark
is light Things in the air
��Tie Ta Tie Ta
��Tie Ta Tie Ta

��people gone
��Cows moo in the fields and are gone
It does not hold
��Hums Hums Hums
Hung birds in bottles, eggs writhing like worms
��and the fire burns.

VI. Little Lifetimes

Children crush crackers between stones
celebrating luck and joy
seeing with ears, breathing music from trees, flowering
in pure deliciousness
awakening graves, unarmed againstt the rain.
In time -- silence:
��stoning sterile trees,
praying the dead will sleep between the swollen roots.
The wind rushes in saying hold my ground, carve
your own road -- the design that develops.

Now a face begins to emerge seeking air
examining death to doscover patterns
in the movements of little lifetimes.



Scars Publications


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