Elegy with Rotting Pumpkin & Mick Jagger

Those final years before I left Nebraska, my mother spent
all day sleeping in a green armchair, or standing on the wood

deck, looking out over the retreating tree line, scanning
for a cardinal, a possum. The swaying figure of my father came

& went as he pleased, & I felt then that something was wrong, 
something I wouldn’t come to know until years later

when I lived alone for the first time. Afternoons
I sat & wrapped twine around the pink legs of a bird so

they wouldn’t splay in the oven’s heat. It made sense then 
never to come home. That winter I stood naked

over the iron grates on the floor as the heat blew & watched 
the snow cover the steps leading to the wood slats

of my front porch. Sometimes there’s nothing I can do
to stop myself from hating the man in the auto-parts store

who doubts I can change a headlight on my own, 
then I hate him more when I walk back from the rain

to ask for his help. I used to go to parties at night,
have my drinks, talk to people. After I walked home alone

I’d watch the Rolling Stones play their sold-out show 
in Tempe, Arizona, 1981. Before the first chord hits,

Mick Jagger points out & asks, Are you feelin’ gooooood?
& I’d stand in my living room, wearing only my socks,




& try to imitate his hips & his lips, singing along, Well, ain’t I 
tough enough, come on baby please. The morning would show,

& I would wake & work the kitchen. At the woodfire oven 
in the forest of the Florida panhandle, now & then I’d lose

a blob of cheese from a lasagna pan, & as it hit the oven’s stone 
floor, I smelled first the melt, then the char. I wander house

to house, room to room, looking in the desk drawers
of strangers, each medicine cabinet a little different from any

other, that quiet noise a doorknob makes when the lock is set.
In a small room my grandfather commanded glass to shape

& soldered together lollipop reds & jay blues, the stained shards 
becoming finch or monarch butterfly, the desk lamp

covered with a canvas sheet to simulate the sun’s soft light
playing on each suncatcher strung with fishing line from the exposed

wooden beams. Nine blocks from his home I worked
at the Pepsi bottling plant in summers during high school,

the warehouse floor sticking to shoes with each step, & my hands 
in those days smelling always like syrup. When my grandfather

died, my grandmother closed that workshop door
& never opened it again. Twelve years later, after the flood,

the hinges swung open to a room of broken glass. 
The buffalo grass already turned brown in the cold,




another dark sky moving across that North Dakota town.
On my porch a pumpkin rots, its dull ocher echoing

that Christmas sky ten years ago when I walked the white 
street home, each footprint behind me filling in. It’s past

eleven & I should be asleep, but on the stove is a pot of apples 
& oranges, cinnamon sticks & star anise.

Read more from Issue 17.1.