RRX

I come from a house on the Mad River Railroad,

child of a cloudy yard-bitten bottle and a spike my mother still drives

through each day’s fontanel, as she’s a believer in both the bay’s winter

ice color, what the bottle conserves, and also what breaks it.

If nothing else, I come from the boneclasped belief that family’s a country

you dig up or sink to, as when a plumbline drops into the bay

and catches on a fishwhispery Chevy. I too come from love spiked

with bad decision making, so when I fed the slow boy Johnny

purpling nubs from a shrub tangled behind our house with not a berry

too sweet and afterwards our mothers clattered together like hysterical pan lids,

my father suggested, or so the neighborhood heard it,

“Give Terri the car keys.” Because I come from ballbearing factories,

munitions plants, plexiglass plants and glacier-scraped corn country,

railroads offered the systematic mercy of crosshatching—a method even now

I both come from and leave by—via tracks webbing to Canada but with history’s

unnerving calibration somehow missing, like a grain elevator occasionally misses a silo,

Johnson’s Island, whose southern POW boys I come from too

when I imagine freezing, being hungry, and pining for my mother

in a grave that pushes up the wrong name like a crooked milk tooth

under the same astigmatic moon my 4F father will arrive by,

whistling and smoking, the systematic off-chance that lets me

climb into my own poison skin and spit this into your mouth.