A napkin holder shaped like a garden gate with painted
trumpet vines. The old couple whose goodness was unassailable.
They slapped their knees when they laughed at our antics,
which were really not that funny. Chewing graham crackers
into the shapes of guns. The old couple, Mr. and Mrs. Riddle.
Their drab mouths, their teeth in a jar, their dishes and glassware
the color of the amber that traps mosquitos. Their house edged
in yellow gladiolas I called flower pokers. My father’s tumors
bloomed like thought balloons in cartoons but inside them was
only a sigh. My mother set her hair on fire leaning over a lit
cake and it seems her hair was on fire for many days. Or was that
the lady with the red bouffant whose big thighs shook when she
walked up the sidewalk toward the place called Beauty, where she
got her hair piled and pinned. The mice in our house were tame,
willingly incorporating themselves into our games. Tail hanging out
of the dollhouse window. A wasp hid in my underpants and stung
my biscuit. My mother called it my biscuit. My father said that’s
the way of wasps or he thought it and I read it in the big white
moonflower that hung above him, attached by a green umbilical
cord. He’d walk to work every day, thin suit, boot-polish hair.
Hope was a vinegar-colored halo that formed around our heads.
It came and went, like fighting and fireflies. From the schoolyard
I could see my mother holding a basket of wet laundry
with clothespins in her mouth. It was strange to watch my own
dresses and blouses swaying on the line. As if I’d been skinned alive.