Callaway

My mother pulled me back to where
the pines didn’t smell like Christmas,
to where the heat often blurred the streets,
the other boys grinning at me like
a mirror they wanted to break. The girls
liked my voice at first—they said,
Say “aluminum” again and asked if I ever
had tea with the Queen, my black hair
limp over one eye. Strip malls were the new
cathedrals, every Winn-Dixie another
chapel, each credit union a strange
prophecy. I stood there in too-tight jeans,
Converses torn, while a group of boys
called me fag and fairy with the casual air
of someone walking up before a sucker-punch.
Still, the nights came lush and wet, and when
my mother fell asleep from her merlot,
I smoked her Marlboro Reds out back,
looking at the bayou where I saw bull sharks
and dolphins, the little bridge where
I kissed a girl for a dare and said I enjoyed it.
Someone’s cousin rented a pontoon
and wrapped it in Halloween lights, bringing
on board a cooler full of Rolling Rock
and Natural Ice. The cane toads and tree frogs
called through so many nights. A water snake even
slipped by my heel like it had come from
a past life. And always, my father far off
in New Mexico, retired, measuring his life
with estate sale finds, still calling to speak
to my mother, never saying, Be strong, son,
even though I wouldn’t have known
what that meant. I learned to duck before fists
landed, to laugh like I liked any of it, to throw
rocks with more might than I ever wanted.
One boy broke my lip for wearing eyeliner
at a bonfire, even though I thought the shadows
were enough to mask it. He bled, too,
but from his knuckle—I watched it drip onto
a hot brick. Years later, miles and miles away,
I remember that bayou, that snowy egret
in the shallows straight as a ruler,
my sitting there under a magnolia trying
to survive with whatever grace I could note.