Mid-Day Heists

Those aged shoulders sag
under the weight of
worn bra straps
and nineteen years of disappointment.

The crumpled form
of her body, a twisted
deja vu
I cannot quit reliving -

A white car, balled up like paper
by that eighteen-wheeler,
his life lost in a game
of childish, classroom basketball;

My body, heaped and heaving
on the department store floor.
A reporter, glassy eyes behind eyeglasses,
released his name seconds before;

His mother, collapsed atop the coffin
confining her son’s mangled
adolescent body.
There was no open casket.

Tonight’s shouting match
leads him to bed, and she
sweeps up the wreckage
of broken bottles and broken teeth.

Heineken and my father
have disfigured her,
a type of ruination
I have only seen once before -

The tornado crept into town
shortly after the sun set.
All the transformers were tangled
like the knots in my hair that summer;

Small yellow houses,
huge brick homes along
my school bus path
became toppled Lego dreams;

The old lady who waved
from her porch rocking chair,
fell and wept beside the splintered remains
of her husband’s memory.

Destruction is painful,
a tragic thing,
when it jumps out like guests
of a surprise party -

A tornado rips apart homes
in your hometown, or
your English partner, dead and distorted,
the day before the paper’s due.

The demolition
of a woman
happens like bank robberies
at two in the afternoon.

Daddy shatters her grandmother’s vase,
and mama cries.
He crushes her esophagus.
She dies.