When the radio blasted
over the art gallery,
and Jim Morrison crashed
my only reading in the Big Apple,
eyes of famous poets in the audience
averted from my broken smile,
I wasn’t there—I went way past the headlights,
out past unrecorded tribal rubric,
airwaves drumming through me,
flew to a hideout on my own back streets:
Schadhouser’s yard, 1953,
one sticky afternoon
we beat each other up
on the same wedge of dirt
my mother, a little girl, played
Hopscotch on in 1929
between Cronin’s barn and a paint peel
on the fence of a three-decker—
who knows who lived there—
Cid Corman maybe
who moped down Annabel
muttering blessings.
That afternoon, my smile might have
made you grimace, too.
It does me, as my fingerprints
corrode this yellowed polaroid
the hostess was so quick to shoot
before she unplugged “Riders on the Storm.”
My father’s gift for the rare
true smile and my grandmother—
cloud hair, morbidly soft skin,
and tyrannical—come back alive again,
come back to me
through this photograph of a shudder
and a trace of alleys and shame
in my disrupted line,
her only recorded history
when, circa nineteen-ten,
she took the hand of the one
who kicked this broken smile
down the staircase of the spine.
Michael Daley’s poems have appeared in APR, New England Review, Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Rhino, North American Review, Gargoyle, Writer’s Almanac, and elsewhere. Awarded by Seattle Arts Commission, National Endowment of Humanities, Artist Trust, and Fulbright, his fourth collection of poetry, Of a Feather, was recently published. He lives in Anacortes, Washington.
