First Memory

POETRY

by George HS Singer

It went unnamed—so young I did not know
how to speak of the way my body refused
ordinary expectations of ground or floor
to hold my next step, muscles locked
and legs halted. I did not know how
to say I heard a drone as if unseen wasps
menaced me all around and inside my own skin.
I had no name for the way my breath
wouldn’t come to me when my chest
clenched by its own will like stepping
out the door without a coat into the frozen
winter night, the wind like a hatchet
chopping breath into gasps. That is,
I did not know how to say, I am afraid.
I need some help.
                        So when I heard my father’s
voice come through the woven wicker
speaker in the breadbox sized radio
(he was the local newscaster)
announcing the air force would bomb
a city, I did not know how he would
get out of that box with no door,
and I thought it was my family’s city
and so the ones I might lose were
the only ones I had. I cried all
day until my sister explained to my mother
and she told me father was not locked
in the electric box and the bombs were not
for us, not this time.

As the Crow Flies

POETRY

by George HS Singer

I told you of the boy who lived up Cheyenne Canyon,
how he had this crow that glided behind him
as he walked to school, how it appeared
out of the sky every afternoon at three PM
on the nose to drift behind that boy
as he walked back up the Canyon, clockwork black.
We were both gobsmacked I’d managed
to tell a story you’d never heard before,
that there still remained one unsaid thing
between us.

Sometimes I think I have ruined my life
with my repertoire of lies, my cruel temper,
the way I became my father’s son.
But then I think I may yet amaze you again.