​“You Smell Like a Rapp" 

​
my sister said one summer night with disdain. Of course she was right. 
I'd been at our cousin’s all day,  Squirting around, messing up furniture 
playing "coottie tag." Putting things back to right so their mother 
wouldn't use her hair brush on them while I sat home scot free 
eating my own mom's overcooked liver smothered in onions.

They were all teachers, our parents, my mom, my uncle, aunt. 
Dad the odd one out, a pharmacist who counted pills up on a loft 
that set him just a few feet above the rest of the town so he had 
to step down two stairs to meet customers for a consultation.

We played at the Rapp’s place mostly, sandbox, 
tree-fort, basement because our house was shadowed.
My parents were locked in some long-standing struggle 
so tainted by disapproval that my mother finally painted 
our walls tabernacle gold to try and shut out the sorrow of 
two people married decades without an iota of tenderness left.

Never a blush of sexuality there. I think that if they did ever bump, 
dad just mounted her the furtive way a turtle tugs another turtle down - 
jerks jism quick before the begrudging, bottom turtle can 
shrug away, to keep scrabbling its belly over earth. 

Every once in a while working close with someone 
I’ll catch that scent again. I still think it comes from 
an almost feral urge to be superior in some way.  
They were always bragging. Jimmy was the fastest at school. 
Kathy’s watercolor of a snowy barn, wood fence, oats took 
first at county They couldn’t stop saying how they were  
going back to California someday.  It was the deep sort 
of smell dogs go by, one soap could barely touch.

This morning I just wonder if kids even get that close.
Most lounge on couches pushing buttons. My kids 
had to travel to Atlanta with us on holidays to reach 
those screamed pitches. Trade smells. Three of those 
cousins of mine actually do live in California. One 
is in Durango, Colorado. I have a brother in Florida, 
one in Illinois. A sister in D. C. My oldest sister ended up 
here in Louisiana where some adult children still put trailers 
on their parent’s back lots and grandmas slap pbjs together 
summer noons. Mostly its gotten lonesome in this country