I grew up in a house on Sweet Air Road just outside the tiny town of Jacksonville, Maryland.
This poem’s from around a quarter of a century ago, maybe longer: it is undated. I remember that I typed the surviving copy — and I do mean typed: it still has the little dabs of Wite Out® where I screwed up — from the handwritten original at my temp job at Northern Life Insurance, circa 1993. Suffice it to say that when I wrote this, I was still a kid, though I would have fiercely argued otherwise. (Clearly, I had a tabbing problem.)
One working definition of an adequate poem is “an improvement on silence.” I think that, at that time at least, this was.
Sweet Air
breathes alcohol blossoms
blurs pressed-flat, cut-dried memories.
Turn a corner in that house
in your mind
sick, sweet air finds you.
Follow your brother
in your dream
into the black at the bottom of the basement stairs;
Watch as he turns and you see
his face has changed—the sheeted head
of a ghost—not your brother at all.
Don’t run. Go dumb—paralyzed.
Dream again
see a man, strange and dangerous,
standing in your bedroom grinning.
Scream silent like they say abortions do.
Know that if downstairs they
could hear they’d come
warm to you.
but they can’t
so they won’t
won’t
won’t won’t
warm to you.
Listen to the one come now
(ah, you’re not dreaming)
cricking knee climbs the stairs;
It’s Mom
Dad comes more silently,
soft drunken concentration up
the carpeted steps
exploding through the door, roaring!
Lie rigidly, impossibly asleep.
It wouldn’t have saved you if you were.