MAUREEN FLANNERY

INESCAPABLE STORIES

Sometimes the radio just casts out a line
and at the end is a lead sinker
as toxic as it is weighty.
It settles to the bottom of your psyche
and slowly corrodes there year after year.

I can recall the exact location
of the car
when I heard a story,
sandwiched in among
the day's shootings
and political non-sequiturs.
It was New Year's Eve,
one of those bitter cold Chicago nights.
It seems a baby had been found in an alley
alive and nestled against the icy body
of its murdered mother.
I felt as if
I had been her helpless body
lying, losing warmth,
my milk turning to frost
in useless breasts,
feeling the small suction mouth
groping across me for a responsitive nipple,
the fine, soft hair moving over my stiffening neck
like a caterpillar on a tree trunk,
my deaf ears retreating from the whimpers
that, unchecked, escalated through cries and wails
into the gasping, staccato breaths
of a baby who has spent its vocal energy
and now only despairs of having its needs met,
my hard arms wet with the warm diaper seepage
that soon turned cold and hardened too,
my fixed eyes unable to follow
the chubby fingers kneading my cheek,
my dry, dumb throat
whispering no comfort,
humming no lullaby.

By now that baby is an adult
and I know that someone
has a secret heavier than all secrets
buried in a body
that cannot bear to pick up ice cubes.

There was another
Paul Harvey threw out
with flippant superiority
and appropriately timed pauses.
It happened in Brazil.
Where else but on Latin soil
where the magically real is the everyday
and Santisima Muerte the ultimate seductress?
This anecdote concerned
a different ill-fated couple
of star crossed lovers
preparing for their wedding day.
When she died, he had her
waked and buried in her wedding dress,
and tried to find some reason
to prod forward into life.
But after a month,
when he could no longer
endure the longing,
he unearthed her
and retrieved from death
the wedding night encounter
she had stolen from him.
It was a story so full of macrabre passion
I wanted Edgar Allen Poe to have told me
about the web of desire that began
in his mind the night of her death
and grew, slowly tangling back on itself
winding around all rational thought
until it had encased the whole of his
gray, blurred thinking in its single-purposed net.
I wanted to live in his disintegrating life
for that full month, and then
to know what he was saying to himself,
to her, as he worked up the lather in his shaving mug,
rubbed his body with sandalwood tac,
slicked his wavy black hair away from his widow's peak
and walked pensively into the courtyard
to pick a gardenia for his lapel.
I wanted to see him prepare
the wedding night paraphernalia,
the candles, the blanket
that he placed in his knapsack
with devotional ritual
along with the shovel
that would exhume the ghastly object of his desire.
I did not want to dismiss
this brooding, intense young man
driven to madness beyond madness
by his unfulfilled passion.
I wanted the rest of the story
the one Paul Harvey or News of the Weird
could never give me.

This morning I'm caught again
by a disturbing blurb.
I shouldn't listen to the radio
on my way to work.
This time a three-year-old boy
was discovered having spent three days
closed in their apartment
with his dead mother.
For each year of his life
one day to share her journey
to the underworld.
But she has eaten all the pomegranate seeds
and cannot return.
Nor can she move on.
Her soul is moored
to this boy she cannot sing to as a rocking boat
that makes no sound in the water.
As her life tableau passes in reverse
it pauses at the instant of his birth
for her to savor that first touch
of the wet, warm flesh
that came forth from her.

What were my children like at three years old?
Undaunted embodiments of motion
needing all questions answered,
each accomplishment commented upon,
every feat of daring observed,
and the whole curious new world explained.
How often does he ask her to wake up,
at first in a timid, so as not to wake her, whisper,
soon progressing, in the absence of response,
to his most tyrannical tone?
I am here, she tells him
I shall always be with you.
But he cannot hear her
for he is three, and is losing all recall
of the realm she now must move within.
He only pleads, "Mommy, Mommy,
Why don't you answer me?

How many times that first day
does he stop his play
and go back into the room
to see if she is finally ready to watch?
By night, darkness creeping in
like a Boogie Man,
his wind-up motion all wound down,
he nestles in beside her and cries
at her curious unwillingness to hold him
and falls asleep with his head on her tummy
his small rhythmic chest
breathing carrion chemicals
emitting from her cold, rigid flesh.

By the second day
his micro-machines speed across
the kitchen floor like roaches.
His playmobiles stomp
and approach each other, threatening,
their stiff arms forbidding embrace.
But often he is startled by an amorphous luminosity
and he starts jabbering again
telling the room that he is hungry
telling the house what he is doing
telling the large, hard doll that
was his mother why he is afraid.

What do the dead and the living
say to each other
at such times as these
when their intersecting lives diverge
and the universe is
irreversibly altered
by their conduct?