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