My first kiss was the Polish boy
who lived down the street.
My little brother’s first kiss was
the Polish boy’s little brother,
but we didn’t know what it meant
to be gay, so we never talked about it.
We never talked about a lot of things,
like the way our mother’s mind
became untethered from the rest of her,
or how we never knew what we were doing wrong,
until we found ourselves in pain because of it.
By then, it was too late, and the only lesson
we ever learned was that love hurts,
and you can never do anything to fix it.
So when the police came, we kept our mouths shut.
Our father was the devil but we knew him.
He had taught us how to be what we were.
When he asked us if we deserved it,
we already knew the correct answer.
We swallowed our tears and said, “Yes, sir.”

11/01/2011

Author's Note: So, I was inspired by a friend of mine, who's been posting these poems lately with state abbreviations as the titles, and I thought, I could write poems about the different places where I've lived. The thing is, of course, that if you follow my poetry, or you know me, some of this stuff is going to be familiar to you, and I'm not trying to repeat myself, just trying to get a solid picture of what each place means to me in my mind. So, Lemay, Missouri is a suburb of St. Louis. I lived there for part of second, all of the third, and part of the fourth grade. While we lived there, our mom went kind of batshit crazy, and our dad decided that having a basement and not living in an apartment in the middle of the city where people might hear something meant that he was free to beat us even more often and without even a pretext of an excuse. We were routinely rounded up and herded downstairs to be yelled at and then whipped for our collective infractions, no specifics needed. We were bad, you see. We deserved it. No further explanation required.

Posted on 11/01/2011
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