Cher Ami
For heaven’s sake, they used your home against you.
They call it magnetoreception.
Magnets make it better.
They called you a man, and it made it okay.
You lost your leg, eye, and chest,
And then they stuffed you.
I want to see you, but I also I don’t.
I’m sorry they stuffed you.
Observations at the Hospital
You wear flip-flops as your father dies.
I hear you flop down the halls
as I relieve you to go watch.
It is in this moment, however,
that I realize we do share something:
a toe.
The girls do not care, and that is comforting
because I do not either.
We talk of schools and homes and mothers,
but we do not talk of the man that
has been scraped inwardly to death.
At one point, I had been angry.
Not because of the scraping, but
because one got to live and the other didn’t,
but now they are both gone, so the score is even.
Forever it will play in my mind
how I learned what the word “pervert” meant.
And how he applied it.
I think of the cold Confederate ring on the cold finger
and grin.
But as you flip-flop down the hall, you don’t know any of this.
