by Alejandro Derieux-Cerezo
1
(Erasure of The Opposites Game
by Brendan Constantine)
Everything
we said
Didn’t say
Words and the spaces
They’re looking at each other—
Now.
2
When your father buys a gun—
Find it stashed at the house in the cul de sac
In the banister of the wooden stairs,
where
You fell to the floor and he kicked you
Over and over, when you were seven, or six, or five
Eyes closed, you waited for it to end, curled
On the boards you wish had snapped from below.
Regardless, you find it, so you better turn off
The safety,
like when he would drive with no hands
On the highway going thirty-over, speeding straight
Through parking lots into the storefronts, stopping
Just short, just to scare you, just for fun, just enough
To make you grip the latch on the car door.
Fold a butterfly to a bullet.
Load it next to the baby teeth, the belt buckle.
Cock the hammer back and hear it click.
Place your finger on the trigger,
you remember
How the call button felt, unpressed, after the dial
Last time he hit your brother
How you held the phone up to his face like the barrel.
Aim a fucking hole through the sun, then break
The clenched fist against the body.
3
When your father buys a gun, find it stashed
In the purse where his mother kept her pistol
When they lived in New York.
Find it in his house ringed with white hate
In neighboring lawns like a target.
Hear the casing
Fall like every syllable in his name
The way the accents don’t land properly
On white tongues
The way teachers always thought his name
Was your mother’s
Because they didn’t know how to read it
And it was his father’s name as well.
My father’s name as an ode—
Pierce the sun like cartilage and clear
A bullet clean through it.
