Three Poems
by Tyrone Jaeger
Perhaps the Dam Will Hold
I’m drying out like a late Raymond Carver story but these Arkansas rains . . . Leaks trickle in the kitchen and living room. Drips pop in pails and tupperware. Water above, water below. My APRN assures me the pain and blood only internal hemorrhoids. Breached pipes. Ruptures abound. I survey the storm from a window and behold the sill, carved in child scrawl it is okay. I might rage. The child denies—and later tosses my way a wadded paper confession I did it. :( :( x2 please do not be madx2 I might cry but instead close my eyes and whisper it is okay. itis okay. itisokay.
Another Wet Winter, Arkansas
Dock submerged in flood brown I paddle up the lake’s narrowing roots two creeks, Beaverfork and Pickles Gap. The gathering of fog disperses, ascends, a sect awaiting worshipers and three corn-fed bucks climb the slope and stop, peer down at the water drifter, me. Winter-wiped trees and greenbrier lay bare the wooded shoreline. I marvel at the awful flotsam—basketball, bicycle helmet, lures and bobbers, styrofoam cups and bits—tossed from boats and cars, washed off lawns, draining down the ditch—and one prostrate, dead forever goose, head immersed as if in shame or prayer.
Lost in the Forest of Unaware
You at fourteen, a sapling with spooked brown eyes, careful through the hallways, where the bathroom toughs wait at the stair top, lookout bored with no teacher on the way to bust smokers. You are fresh meat to be grabbed and taunted. They smell your fear through the pine-scented deodorant your mother said you should start wearing, but she is nowhere and does not exist in this thicket of bodies and threats. Inside that bathroom they suck on cigarettes and you imagine murder on their minds. I promise that someday you’ll see that they were just fucking with you. Still, you have teary sleepless nights and want mothering, but your parents watch St. Elsewhere and where exactly are your words? Years later, you will be the boy who walks in the bathroom to smoke a pinner and will see your tweaker cousin has, miraculously unaided, tied to the stall frame a nerdy classmate upside-down by his shoelaces. Let ’em down, you’ll say. Your tweaker cousin will laugh and fire his lighter. The boy falls, head-smacked on the tile. He mutters thanks as he exits the door, and you’ll stand at the window uncertain why you entered in the first place.