Parents

Erica Kimmel

parents
pair, rant, apparently with time all things become clearer
and more still between eruptions. 
Parents, rent a space for me and she can stay here too. 
Write a check. Make it thick. Slip it into my pocket and set
me squawking down the sidewalks that crack beneath my
fingerbones that crack too. 
Switch the money! 
The other box is emptying as this one fills that one and empties
into some one. 
forty thousand floats in a space that only exists in my father’s
waking. 
We will die as we die, we die to live to tie you to the swealthy
mess of what is meant to mean something to someone else who
I will never be. 
I’ll wear a stained wife beater when my greatgreatgrandfather’s
third girlfriend once but now too old to be a wife pulls two
hundred one hundred dollar bills out from between her soft
white curls, that fall from her head lock by lock by lock lock lock
and seep beneath my skin. 
I’ll rip off my wife beater at my chest on day, 
And run naked through the streets of a new city
paved with Irish slate roofs to walk on, walk on.