Oscillate

His cries rise and the three older boys laugh.

They yell down at him,

the child, wrapped in an eggshell blanket,

bundled on the ground.

*

The child struggling to rise,

and they,

taking turns twisting the hammock—

spinning him off—

taking turns bullying the child.

*

His cries keep rising,

and I, sitting,

in this soft-yellow kitchen

of our winter-frigid, boxcar house,

breathe, just enough not to drown out their voices

echoing in the front yard.

*

The war continues.

Their mother calls from across the street,

opening her front door, yelling—

*

and another mother,

a neighbor from our first house in Folsom

(where rats scurried over the flea market furniture

at night when all the lights had gone out).

I was only 10 years old.

She shouted, "It's dinnertime!" at 3pm

from her front door,

summoning her two ashamed sons inside

so they couldn't play with the colored girls

across the street.

*

The same war continues.

Lucidity, in this moment

"is an on and off thing.”

I watch these children strive against each other

as that mother strove against my little sister and I,

*

in a way, strove against my father.

When he inquired about our early return

into the rat house,

we claimed to be tired.

To protect him the way he protected us, we denied

the soft scratch of rodents

on our blankets at night,

believing we heard the creaks of antiquity,

not the persistent shriek of poverty.

*

The cries rise out in the yard,

and I, straining,

hear whispers,

low, from those days

when my brother, picking us up from school,

didn’t want to be seen with his sisters,

would walk three blocks ahead.

She and I, struggling

to keep up,

taking that with us into adulthood.

*

All these things rise before me—

the child's blanket rolling on the ground

a mother’s voice calling to another in the past

a dilapidated house that made a father shiver in bed during midsummer,

feeling as if he had failed his children

the way we gathered mistletoe for the boys, leaving them on their

doorstep as the mother watched fearful from within—

any of these stories

speak of what it is to be

"stormed or quieted by our own things.”

A blinking

that confounds as it illuminates,

clouds fluttering over a full moon,

bringing company shadowed in the night.