I spread my game on the cracked linoleum floor:
I had to play inside all day.
The woman who kept me said so.
She was middle-aged, drank tea in the middle of the day,
her face the color of dust layered on a table.
A high window let in alley light
to a two-room apartment.
A sofa and chair bristled like hedgehogs
and made the back of my legs itch.
No red flowers on the windowsill. No radio.
Just waxy vines drooping over the tables,
a dome clock dividing time into fifteen-minute parcels.
What did I do all day?
Made card houses so frail
I had to turn my breath the other way.
Or colored the newspaper comic strips,
or wobbled across the floor in my mother’s old pumps
with the aplomb of somebody drunk.
Enter my father at 5:15, dark and immediate,
finished with his shift at the factory.
He was hiding something behind his back.
He turned as I circled him,
keeping whatever it was out of sight.
Close your eyes and hold out your hand-
I touched a globe slotted on top for coins,
my hand shadowing the continents
like a cloud thousands of miles wide.
He put my finger over the state where we lived,
then handed me his loose change to fill the world up with.
Memory’s false as anything, spliced in the wrong parts,
queerly jumping. But better than forgetting.
We walked out into the soft light of October, leaves
sticking to our shoes like gold paper.
I was four years old and he was twenty-five,
same age as I am writing this.
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