First Kiss

Viaduct, overpass, backwood, breaker. It was ‘76 in coal country,
dragline and mine fire, a bicentennial that wasn’t

for our town, between the projects and Orchard Street,
at 13, the terrible knocking of teeth. It was Sicily against Naples,

shrines and the Old Country, sentinel against lawn Virgin,
nothing but lips and grapes at the breast, skin in the bushes

of the East Side graveyard. It was Tony Tolerico:
roughneck, bad boy, gearhead, a breaking and entering

between the headstones of Bruno and Angelini
that morphed: the great stone face of my father

waiting for me to mow the lawn—him, hands, rusted grip,
the mower, yanking the pullcord, idle, engine, off.

But the mouth of Saint Anthony, portable and without grace.
Anthony, hammer, finder of things, or the other one,

guardian of butchers and gravediggers. He could say
stay and always in two languages, a corrupt tongue

and a body I believed. Later in the driveway,
my father looked up from his truck for a moment,

and, without speaking, disappeared again under the hood.
Disappeared the way the thick, foreign names of our grandparents

attracted the soles of our shoes then let us slip off,
disappeared like a trail of fresh-cut grass away from our houses

and the lives we’d lose there. And Tony, in 8th grade,
with a blonde girl from another school. The overlapping circles,

outlined by tiny ridges of dark green, a layer of skin pulled back
like an altered memory: my father, watching from the porch,

the smell of fresh-cut grass the only thing I found that mattered.

From chapbook Obscene Rhetoric (Philadelphia, Pa: Archangel Press, 2002)

Return