Two Poems

GARBAGE When you picked me up early from school, I thought I was in trouble and I clung to the door handle in the van. I had never been fishing with you before. We pulled off along a dirt road and carefully cleared a path through maples to a spot you liked. You explained the difference between Rainbows and Browns while I hooked unsuspecting worms: jabbing the end through the head or the tail and popping it out a few stripes down. It’s about time you boys start calling me dad, you said. I lost my first bite, but the second one stuck, and I won the fight, reeling him to the bank where you grabbed him: my first catch. God damn suckerfish, this is a garbage fish. You unhooked him and let me see him —glistening and golden, blood unspooling from his lip— before smashing him still on a flat rock. You sent him somersaulting into the dirt.   EARLY SIGNS That frosty night, we left them blended into the flannel quilt, sneaking dirty words from heartpocket flasks while we found a pickup game behind the bleacher stampede. State’s marching band scored us as we crisscrossed the crisp October five o’clock shadow of summer. Our collisions weren’t moose clacks of facemasks and helmets instead they were antelope hides slapping solid earth when feet flipped skyward. Fistfights broke out, then up. Ankles swiveled in cleat-tracks, loose knees landed charley horses on skittering thighs, and one boy quit—bitten by the rabid dogpile. But the game ended with a two-teamed huddle around my brother: showing us what he’d seen during the game and crept under the bleachers to swipe. He thumbed through $20 after eye-widening $20, before handing off a few shushes to accessories. Make-up and Kleenex bunches: fumbled to frostbitten mud. After scoring, he spiked the purse and tucked his gain into his pocket. All of us scattered to the stands where they were waiting to take us home, as it was almost bedtime.