Stain
Biography Written On
That Summer
Spot of ink
on scrap of paper towel
dipped in deco high-ball glass:
it’s an experiment of spectrum,
my father says.
Water scrubs the marker’s dot
into smudge up paper fibers:
black-blue-yellow, ill-
defined gradient edging like
the stain up his shins in the weeks
before he died.
The toddler only knows one color: yellow.
Everything is yellow. The birthmark
above her diaper, brown,
would be yellow
if she could see behind her
to call it. The stain of mine
on the ripe melon of my teenaged ass-cheek
didn’t fade until college. It bloomed red,
spread out beyond my bathing suit’s cut
that evening when my father poked it:
What IS that?
As if my boyfriend had sucked it there.
As if my father had forgotten
it was mine.
The sky is baking-pan flat, is black road, is empty bed.
The sky is wearing its early forties, is cooking chicken soup, is actually
making mud pies and calling them ambrosia. The sky hates people
who hit their dogs, has never tried burlesque dancing, speaks lousy Italian
in a voice rasped by years of acid. The sky has several tics. The sky sneaks,
is a list-maker, wants you to like it. The sky is half a bottle,
is alone in an empty apartment, is filled with rain and tannins, can’t stop
picking up the phone to call.
As the lake sank in drought,
my mother and I swam. Every night
my thighs' thick hanks eclipsed
her collections:
lidded urns, round like hips,
designs red and gold, roped with tiny burst and bud,
and flocks of ceramic owls,
shelved in lines, eyes bigger than breasts.
I studied my affect.
On land, I puffed air from my lips
sent dust flying from her things into yellow light.
In deeps I floated, my body
a giant buoy in gravity’s tumult,
heavy yet bobbing: breasts, legs, rear
competing for surface.
The whole summer went.
I pushed elements around.
Her little things collected dust.
The hot scrim of days gave way.
We stopped swimming in the lake –
or say it this way:
the lake emptied.
Lisa Schapiro Flynn has published poems in The Beacon Street Review and Thirteenth Moon: A Feminist Literary Magazine, among others. She received an MFA from Emerson College.
