Finding the Lego


You find it when you’re tearing up your life, 
trying to make some sense of the old messes, 
moving dressers, peering under beds. 
Almost lost in cat hair and in cobwebs,
in dust you vaguely know was once your skin, 
it shows up, isolated, fragmentary. 
A tidy little solid. Tractable. 
Knobbed to be fitted in a lock-step pattern 
with others. Plastic: red or blue or yellow. 
Out of the dark, undamaged, there it is,
as bright and primary colored and foursquare 
as the family with two parents and two children 
who moved in twenty years ago in a dream. 
It makes no allowances, concedes no failures, 
admits no knowledge of a little girl 
who glared through tears, rubbing her slapped cheek. 
Rigidity is its essential trait. 
Likely as not, you leave it where it was.

First published in Think Journal.

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Holiday Concert


Forgive us. We have dragged them into the night 
in taffeta dresses, in stiff collars and ties, 
with the wind damp, the sleet raking their cheeks,

to school lunchrooms fitted with makeshift stages 
where we will sit under bad fluorescent lighting 
on folding chairs, and they will sing and play.

We will watch the first grader with little cymbals, 
bending her knees, hunched in concentration 
while neighbors snicker at her ardent face.

Forgive us. We will hear the seventh-grade boy 
as his voice finally loses its innocence 
forever, at the unbearable solo moment

and know that now, for years, he will wince at the thought 
of singing, yet will ache to sing, in silence,
silence even to the generation to come

with its night, its sleet, its hideous lunchroom chairs.

First published in Horizon Review