Sean Lause

Midwest theodicy

I hunger for this town that taught my bones.
I bite my wrists to drink the dreaming there.
Lima, Ohio, its streets my arteries,
my heart a factory, prisons in my eyes.
Summer of '68, Martians and Mansons,
blood dripping from each newspaper I tossed
across brown lawns, houses warped from thirst,
water sprinklers clicking diamonds in the sun,
velvet mosquitoes draining our lives
with the necessary needle of need.

Pumping my bike until my thighs quiver
like tender animals, as if the bike's breaths
depend on my search, searching for something,
something in the wonderball night, racing home
from the Ranger Theater, heat lightning
illuminating monsters in the sky.
Home safe, probing shadows, scaring ghosts,
touching the silence in old bowls and spoons,
thirsty pine trees dusting a sleepy moon.

Daylight always came slaughtering children
as I lugged the fallen world up each street,
seeing through the eyes of the junk yard dog
strutting past dead buses and bleeding chevys.
Black man slung on a chair in a doorway,
his sunlit face worn and creased as his shoes,
radio blues, his house a busted skull,
Louise's Drug Store, five cents for water,
rusted ceiling fans swirling exhaustion,
"Nigger Baby" candies trapped in a jar.

Endless Augusts, race riots, skies like bones
cancer moon between abandoned buildings
like an old man creeping between tombstones,
swifts circling, cries striating the sky,
a bum stumbling to join two cigar butts,
young whores across from the police station,
the wind puffing their dresses pink and green,
Kewpee Burger, photos of cows on the wall,
Old Man Ganser clutching the back booth,
chanting tales of Iwo Jima to the floor.

Autumn rains came at last, whispering sweetness.
Blossoming into lightness at route's end,
I learned the art of invisibility,
seeking fleeting redemptions in the doom:
Father humming, spreading mayonnaise sandwich,
Mother in her yellow dress, reading Rimbaud,
bathing the porch in her light, like a firefly
cupped in palms, I lie gently in her lap.
She smoothes my hair in silent benedictions
as swishtree apples thumping the earth, my heart.