James Kangas
If Wishes Are Forces...
Shit, dammit, hell—she’d had
a second son, she'd had
enough. Nipper, she said
(milking her clear chagrin),
I wish you had been born
a girl. Into the whorl
of my ear she pronounced
her burden. Like birdsong
then it flew from her mouth,
an impromptu refrain.
It became (my God!) my first
memory, except for
watching my father
piss in the tall grass
behind the woodshed one
indelible noon, that soft flesh
unloosed from his fly.
When I got big enough
I tried to make her wish
come true--a blue skirt fished
from the rag box, a small
parade. But I outgrew that,
grew tall, grew hair on my chin.
Mother, wanting grandgirls now,
nudged me altarward: When
are you getting married?
In the arms of the best man
I've found yet, I think: Ma,
life suits me just the way it
turned out, thanks (or not)
to you whom some might blame
for wanting me in pink—
sackcloth I thought once
when nothing seemed to fit.
The truth is (well, some frayed
scrap of it)--slipping
into her wish, I found it
became me.
This piece first appeared at Chiron Review, Winter 1992.
Chart on the Wall
Reclusive almost, more than
wincingly shy (my eyes veering
towards a certain football player
I'd spot in the corridor), I didn't
date, I didn't think to
sham convention, I couldn’t have
faked it if I'd wanted to.
Come junior prom time, I had no
intentions—ostrichlike sank my
nose in Jules Verne. My chemistry
teacher got wind of this
and of Barbara D's datelessness,
kept me after lab and said:
If you don't ask her, I'm going to
do it for you. I protested,
and caved in.
She sat cattycornered
from me, but I knew her only
as another wallposy, another latent
person. I bought her a corsage
which dwarfed her breasts,
and we danced once, deadpan,
gaping mouths all around.
Of course she knew we wouldn’t bond—
we weren’t potassium and bromine
to be plugged into a formula,
Mr. Curie, Mr. Quack! And after your
public fizzle with our two incompatible
substances, I trust you took some time
(among your beakers, your burettes,
those twenty Bunsen burners) to mull
the periodic table of elements.
This piece first appeared at Chiron Review, Spring 1997.
James Kangas is a retired librarian living in Flint, Michigan. His work has appeared in Atlanta Review, Does It Have Pockets, The New York Quarterly, The Penn Review, Unbroken, et al. His chapbook, Breath of Eden (Sibling Rivalry Press), was published in 2019.
