Beer & Wasps
We lived near
some railroad tracks
in Gainesville, Florida.
It was summer—
I was three, my sister four;
we were both very hungry.
A wasp had followed
us back from
the ABC store
where my birthmother
had just bought a case
of beer.
As persistent as the Florida
heat or the men
that hovered around
our single-wide,
asking for sex,
sometimes even flashing
their stingers,
the wasp pursued us
with its constant buzzing.
Mother would down
a beer, dodge
that yellow dart,
and discard her empties
on the sidewalk.
It was as if
she were afraid
of getting lost
and needed
a trail of beer cans
to find her way
home—
or what I now think of
as her home,
that alphabet land
of booze.
When she was arrested
and we were all put
into the back of a cruiser,
I clasped my hands
over my ears,
fearing that sonic
corkscrew
might begin again.
My brain was like
a bottle of cheap, red wine
splashing all over
the seat.
After she sobered up,
mother left us
at the station.
An officer said,
his voice too cheerful,
“Hey, little man, have you
learned your ABCs?”
When I did learn them,
I pictured fifty different kinds
of beer, a liquid
language
of ruin.
I had been adopted—
after three years
in foster care.
My sister was in New York;
my birthmother had
disappeared.
All I had left was
the prick
of memory.
In this way, beer
and wasps
gave birth to poetry.
Echolocation
Like bats, their voices boomerang.
My birthmother says, “We’re out of booze,”
as if a three-year-old autistic kid could run
to the liquor store. My birthfather calls me
“R- .” These words have wings:
they hang inside my skull and then, at night,
plunge and pounce, though many years
have passed since I was taken from them.
Baby bats fly tucked inside their mothers’
pouches; they must endure the stealthy
and tumultuous hunt for prey—
the click click click of echolocating pulses.
Does a baby bat experience fear?
I would scream whenever my parents picked me up
and staggered across the room. Tucked inside
their need, I’d find myself searching
for drugs or booze.
Sometimes in dreams they come for me. I can hear
the flapping of wings, the terminal buzz—
nearly 200 clicks per second. “I am in college now!”
I shout. “I have a new mom and dad!”
My cricket heart hides in the grass.
Abandoned at Three
Poor child! he's as like his own dadda
as if he were spit out of his mouth.
—George Farquhar, Love and a Bottle (1689)
Mother of the twelve-pack, mother, did you miss me?
Your genes place their rough hands on my face; they kiss me
(as you never did), they cry, they tousle my hair.
Giving thanks to god, they say, “It’s you! You as me!”
The prodigal son has returned, spitting image
of a Lucky Strike whore—snarling, wistful me,
who once thought anger was a kind of redemption,
its obsidian aftermath a twisted me,
a heart as black and buried as a Pompeian’s.
“It’s me! Me as you!” I say to the mirror’s me,
to the you lost in love’s reflection. You were poor,
alcoholic. You sold your body in Kissimmee,
Florida. Thrice you tried to drown me in the bath;
thrice you stopped yourself. O Rhonda. O David James.
Our Lungs Again
There will be no more hunting and we can understand our lungs again.
– Harmony Holiday
1. Fostercareless, Faster Family
Done gone silver sister. Done gone birth dad. Doggone, dung-heap, dung dad. In Florida we had fear conditioning, central air for the young child’s developing brain. Lung lunge, nose need, pure, Pope-like terror. The soul is God’s bad breath. Red rover, red rover, it’s really not over. In dreams, I dredge the pond for mom.
2. When My Sister Was Persephone
Demeter was drunk. That dimwitted daffodil fell for any old sun. Wife-beater wind, muscle-crowned cock, king of the black and blue morning. When Hades abducted her, my lungs filled with ice. Amber alert, memory’s pervert. Underfear, underfar, underfoe—“She’s my sister! Assist her!” I moaned.
3. Heartwood
The wood stove wills a fire; the wood stove burns my heart. Duramen by the cord; dura men lord it over the tree-child, that silly, life affirming sap. A second intake valve introduces air into the hottest part of the firebox. O fire-prayer! O sassafras! I said, “Get over here and kiss my ash.” The lungs of hell breathe flame and go on living.
David James “DJ” Savarese (www.djsavarese.com) is an artful activist, multi-genre writer,
scholar and teacher. A 2022/23 Iowa Arts Fellow and Zoeglossia Fellow, he is the author of
Swoon (2022) and A Doorknob for the Eye (2017)and a co-author of Studies in Brotherly Love
(2021). His lyric essay “Passive Plants” was a notable essay in Best American Essays (2018). His recently published scholarship includes “Disrupting the Garden Wall” in Logic Magazine;
“Enmeshing Selves, Words and Media, or Two Life Writers in One Family Talk about Art and
Disability” in Er(r)go; “Coming to My Senses,” forthcoming in Neurofutures; and “Unearthingthe Concepts That Bury Us,” forthcoming in an anthology on Disability and Dialogue (2023). Co-producer, narrative commentator, and subject of the Peabody award-winning, Emmy-nominated documentary Deej: Inclusion Shouldn’t Be a Lottery (2017), he co-teaches poetrywriting through the LYNX Project in Chicago. As Co-Chair of The Alliance for Citizen Directed Supports, he designed and directs The Lives-in-Progress Collective.
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