Linda Laderman
catastrophe *
you scream after you see
your boy slip in front of a yellow
cab, an ordinary taxi.
The slackening of his body as
it folds into itself while you tremble,
bewildered at the looseness of your
grasp—your inability to know why
you’re standing and he isn’t.
and though the medics tell you
it was no one’s fault, you yell for them
to stop talking, and plead with yourself
for a description of this thing that makes
you keen—a color, a piece of torn cloth,
an origami bird. you hear your wife’s howls.
she wishes it had been you instead. you wish
that too. your words mean nothing. you think
if you go back, you can wake him, like you do
every morning. you’ll cajole him to get up, get out
of that black plastic bag and get home.
*After How Fortunate the Boy by Alicia Ostriker
The brevity of warmth
The summer I turn ten I learn about definitions.
That normal means two parents whose last name
is the same as yours, that ordinary stands
for a Schwinn bike, a sibling, dinner at six,
and coming in when the streetlights come on—
that June captures the brevity of warmth.
I discover laughter can be a weapon or a salve,
depending on who offers it to you. That you
can know who you are even when others don’t.
Mother teaches me about secrets. She says
our dirty laundry is no one else’s business,
even when it becomes everyone’s. Play as if
neighbors don’t see the police climb our steps
to stop the quarrels between her and my stepfather,
or behave like no one hears his tires screech.
But I hear. She caws after him, a broken bird
singing from a porch swing, then sits and waits.
The crack in her voice panics me. Still, I want
to hold onto her hand. He’s found in a rented room,
slumped in a chair, a newspaper opened in his lap,
an empty pack of Winston’s, pistol in his palm.
In July, mother teaches me to dance. Wearing her bra
and half-slip, she wraps strings of my pop-it beads
around our necks. We zig zag across the floor,
her midriff and breasts, spongy, like the yellow cake she
bakes for holidays. When she plugs in the record player
and sings Swanee, I lie on the on the porch swing and clap.
I feel, your love is real.
Mother decides it’s time to leave. We move to a flat.
In her bra and half-slip, she dances in the doorway.
By August, I understand the meaning of shame.
Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet and writer. Her poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, numerous literary journals, including Action-Spectacle, Quartet, Gyroscope, SWWIM, ONE ART, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Scapegoat Review, Rust &Moth, and MER. She is a past recipient of Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s Prize and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her micro-chapbook, What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know, can be found online at https://www.harbor-review.com/what-i-didnt-know-i-didnt-know. In past lives, she was a journalist and taught English at Owens Community College and Lourdes University, in Ohio. More work at lindaladerman.com.
