Read an Excerpt
VACCINATION
The scar on my arm is thin like the skin
of a fruit close to splitting.
It marks my birth as before ’72,
before the end of smallpox but after polio,
after the wheelchairs and the iron lungs,
the radios crackling with war.
If you were born then, you remember
taking your Halloween candy
to the fire station to have it checked
for razor blades. Maybe there was one
black girl in your class like Martha Washington
who brought upside-down clown cones
for her birthday and then moved away.
You watched the Challenger blow up
on the news again and again.
I was there in my boots and eyeliner,
waiting by the wall until a boy
asked me to dance. His mouth was a shock
of salt. I flicked my name off like ash
from my cigarette. I loved how the tip
flamed, like the squares of coal
in our furnace. Maybe you remember
my father. He was thin and transparent
like the place where the needle went through.
Maybe I can peel it off, the dead skin
from a burn, the kind we got back then,
before sunscreen, when we just took off
our clothes and got in.
WHEN YOU HAVE LIVED A LONG TIME IN ONE PLACE
things start to vanish. Like the old Newberry’s
where I used to buy earrings that looked
like tacks, six pairs for a dollar, and then
go sit at the lunch counter with the old people
eating patty melts and drinking black coffee.
They stared in front of them like the women
on the bus with their plastic rain scarves
that they took from their purses when the bus
lurched towards their stop. They wore dresses
from the old country. Now I wonder
if they have nowhere to go. The building
stands empty like a mind that can’t remember
the words that stick things to their places,
pants, chair, toast. How can we remember
if they keep taking things down, like the house
where I lived when I was young and waiting
for love? I lay there in the yard in my bathing suit
pink as a poppy and I could feel his shadow
when it touched my body.
Now there is only a clean slate of grass
where that house stood, the same grass
that covers the spot in Lincoln Park
where there used to be a wading pool
where I took Ben until the day I turned away
to get a toy for him and then he was face down
in the water, and I pulled him out
and we looked at each other and I could see
in his eyes that he couldn’t believe the water
was heartless, that it didn’t know who he was.
BUREAU
When my husband asks me where I put the keys,
I say, they’re on my bureau,
and he says, you mean dresser
and I say, no, bureau.
Your mother must have brought that with her
from New York, he says,
and I say, yes, she carried it with its three top drawers
for her silk panties and slips,
her stockings, the small scent sachets she always used,
embroidered like my grandmother’s
handkerchiefs, my grandmother who came once
a year to see my mother and her bureau,
who poached her egg in the early mornings
on the kitchen stove. I didn’t know poach, didn’t know pocketbook, the black bag
she opened at the metal, magnetic clasp
and drew out a gold tube of lipstick,
a romance novel with a picture of a man
with his hand on a woman’s breast
like the print of the Rembrandt hanging
over our mantel. But that man looked like
he had asked permission, like he knew
he only had this small circle of light
and he should touch the fabric of her dress
before feeling for what was under it,
the skin that had been sleeping
for years beneath a girl’s nightgown,
like the ones I keep folded in my bureau,
and the one I took
from my grandmother’s apartment in Queens
after she died. It is still in its plastic—
she must have ordered it from a catalogue
when she could no longer go down into the city
but had to look out at it from a great height
so she was closer to the telephone wires
her voice traveled to my mother
like a thin road, winding and black, the kind
you drive at night, the moon always with you.
Now that she is gone, I unwrap her nightgown.
It is pink and sleeveless
and I wear it standing on our porch
so I can feel the wind.
