Propriety
By Rosa Alcalá
Photo by Jayne Vidheecharoen via Flickr Creative Commons
My mother turns off the kitchen light
before looking out the window
and half-hidden behind green apple
curtains, takes her nightly inventory
of the neighborhood. That one who asked us
last week for bread, her boyfriend rolls through
to collect the check. The father of one of the girls
drops a bag of groceries on the porch and
drives off. A scratch and thump means
the drunk above us is home. Every multi-family dwelling
has one. Count our own and we have
two. In my room I kneel before my bed
writing poems, and in the attic my mother
waits for my father (who earlier hurled a hacksaw
at my brother) to fall through the trapdoor of sleep.
Then she’ll return to the costume
and sew all night. Another variation
on Spanish dancer. This is what sets us apart
from our neighbors, she tells herself. We work hard
to keep it together. Submerged in lavender I listen to birds
heckle me from the sage bush: It is not the eighties, your parents
are dead, it is noon. Let the family break apart, let
the neighbors look in. To see the frayed sofa? I ask,
panicking. The eggshells on the floor?
Rosa Alcalá reads “Propriety”
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