Patio
It wasn’t summer
till the cheese began to sweat.
My knees
grew ridged: the outlines of pleistocene
lakes on a school map,
in the wrong place.
We lay in indoor sleeping bags
right on the lawn. Dew
soaking through.
Our bodies lumped like swallowed
seeds in too——
hot cloth. Just shapes
of things. Once we sang folk songs
with my uncle, rattling
spoons
above our heads. Once I traced
the old lounger’s stuffing, scratched
a hole with one small finger through
to fluff. Did
you know
about her phone calls late at night to keep
us up? The scarred back wall? My brother
twirled my cousin round, the grass
gone dark.
At Northwood Village
When she came home, she showed
us pictures
from her trip.
All the men’s faces were scratched
out, even
a boy’s.
They looked like ghosts.
This one is Bill,
she said, and this one here is Hal.
The names she told us seemed
like she just made them
up.
The women were unreadable.
Who is that there, somebody
murmured, but she didn’t
hear the question.
Didn’t
want to. See
these sandals.
How the heel leaves air between, how
even in
this one boy’s sneakers
there is skin. See
all this light.
A woman’s leg hung
in between those of a man,
like she was gone.
I think
we’re getting somewhere
we don’t want to go, somebody
whispered. She
scratched faces
out with lines, or blotted
them. Some
were erase-marks, like she’d just
smeared them away. Some
made a mist. If
I have met these men before,
I’ll never know.
This one is Frank, she said, after it wasn’t funny,
this one’s
Fred. This one
is Pete, whose children died,
whose parents burned.
Oak
I wrote
a poem for you on
Hegenberger Road,
but you had left.
We were
the inside of a shark’s mouth,
window shattered.
It’s ok.
Some sharks
dive deep
through the cold ocean, some live
lives as long as ours.
Your whole small town
could hurt my heart
just by existing.
Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California’s Central Valley and co-edits One Sentence Poems and First Frost. She also works as a librarian at UC Merced. Her work has appeared in many online and print journals and her most recent chapbook, Beach Reading, is available through Bottlecap Press. Her villainous secret identity is Elizadeath, a monster truck with pink and purple glitter flames painted on the sides.
