Fossils

by Hudson Wyatt

Grandmother’s jet
black hair fissured
like broken bottles. A waitress
since ten, she worked a hundred
year old restaurant where I
dug sauerbraten and danced
on tables at five years because she
made more tips. Not
an addict like me, she died
in a middle–of–night scream, while I’m
left in a world of many, an odd
feeling really, a being
to myself, a race of myself: I want to press
my fingertips everywhere — to leave
fossils on this planet where my
grandmother’s the only

moon. Mother’s hair was
black too. But hers
I’ll call raven. I don’t
want them to share descriptions — blood —
can’t help that. Mother abandoned
us, even as her
mother lay dying, but my
attic needs new space, a facelift, needs
today, not Christmas
Eve, 1966, when I, dreaming
matchbox cars, crawled
from my bed into hers,
crawled through the reeking
mist of whatever got her
drunk that day, over to some
man, new from last week, arms
draped across mother’s breast. Eyes
open, boy of five too awake, hours
sleepwalking like years, when,
on my thigh, his big
man’s cock pulsed, though I didn’t
know what cock meant then, just a hard thing
that rushed me into real
shame and pleasure, as he took me
down to the sea that’s always
there with its smell, and I stayed
not knowing how to swim until
he fled into some faux nightmare sleepturn.
Mother snored on, he
lasted six–to–eight
weeks, eyes turned
away in a picture taken Christmas
mid–morning —
mother’s glazed
stare under bee–do
hair, her glasses, horn rimmed. One
of seven pictures kept. The others.
at eighteen, fire
to ash.