Poems by Joshua Michael Stewart

GO TO SLEEP YOU LITTLE BABY

In her arms is a blue-eyed boy with a dirty face. Under her flowered dress, she has another on the way. They've been living out of an '85 Buick Riviera, parking all along the Ohio River. She stares out of the pockmarked windshield at a clapboard church. Yellow foxtail grass and ragweed swallow headstones in the churchyard. The sprigs' sway lulls the boy. The graves resemble unmade beds. She studies his long eyelashes as she hums an old Appalachian lullaby her grandma used to sing. Child Services had tried to take her son once before. Nightfall, she points the Buick toward the cold voice of the river.

OHIO, 1989, AGE: 14

 

From the thorny canthus

of his right eye

to his dagger-shaped jaw

 

runs a yellow scar

already old and faded.

He drags on a cigarette,

 

drowns ants in spit,

jokingly calls his buddy

a crackhead motherfucker,

 

a lemon wedge smiling

from his teeth. And in his eyes:

the green light of Wallace Stevens,

 

or better yet, a blade of grass

reaching out for a meager

amount of rain.

 

 

****

 

Venom in his voice,

a rattrap for a tongue.

A dust devil lives in his throat.

 

He's kin to the flatted-fifth,

son of a minor key.

The harmonic structure

 

of his soul possesses the tension

of a dominant-seventh chord

pleading resolve, resolve, resolve.

 

 

****

 

Water balloons, he thinks,

sliding his hands up her shirt,

deep in the tool shed. The recipe

 

 

calls for a tangle of limbs

and tongues—her lips waxy

with strawberry gloss, neck

 

tasting of Aqua Net and salt.

He feels himself push

against the inside of his jeans,

 

sure his prick will snap

like a stick. She unbuttons

him, clamps her legs around

 

his waist, digs in her glitter-nails.

He tells her that he loves her.

He's glad she doesn't say it back.

 

 

****

 

He delights in the smell of talc

as the barber brushes

the back of his neck.

 

It complements the little girl

across the street walking with her

mother in their Sunday best.

 

How the straight razor

used to dance in his mother's hands,

shuffling along the strop, gleam

 

in the lemonade light of summer.

His daddy slouched in a kitchen chair

set on the porch overlooking

 

the chickens scratching the yard bare.

She'd tilt Daddy's head back,

lather his scruff with a horsehair brush

 

and scrape the blade across his face,

holding the razor like a butterfly

by its wings. That was long before

 

the tractor crushed Daddy's ribs,

collapsed a lung, years before

she started reeking of whiskey,

 

a lifetime before she staggered over

and snatched the straight razor

from the boy's hands, and wheeled

 

the blade in a stupor, slicing his cheek,

all before he moved in with an aunt

he didn't even know, down the block

 

from here where the sun paints a square

on the black and white tile floor,

and scissors snip-snip in his ears.