AT THE SKY Carl Boon † The Other America

When I was tender in the breasts and still fourteen, I started sticking pins in the numb flesh of my elbows.

And because it didn’t hurt the way I needed, I set fires in my bedroom, small ones at first, hymn book pages, Barbie hair,

Popsicle sticks. I didn’t want to die, but I wanted to know how death might feel, the stagnant knees, the shouts

from the farthest room fading. On my fifteenth birthday I blackmailed the druggist for a bottle of Secanol

and listened to President Johnson on TV until his voice became banjos in Arkansas, slow and holy sex with the boy on Summit

who didn’t know my name. Instead of being there, I dreamed Vietnam, green consumed by blue and purple flowers,

women on rice-swamps slowly turning against themselves. The colonel who came to the front stoop

carried a flag and called my brother a hero, so I drank six water-glasses full of whiskey and lay on the stale green couch

and the pastor put his bland hand on my knee. I am here for you, my father said, his mouth a horrible grimace,

his eyelids dastardly. I am here for you, but he smelled like model airplane glue and his mistress’s perfume. The weed

transformed the demons into gods, made guitars flesh and flesh guitars, and I lingered in the cellar, watching things:

bicycles gone to rust, tomatoes in jars, my dead aunt’s Electric Galaxy dishwasher. It sat there like an icon, spraying imaginary

plates with imaginary water. A calendar from 1955, a cello—they’d all absorbed some ghosts forced to come back out again.

I sat on the steps and twisted my hair. I wept for my brother and America, the land my teachers said I loved.