Summer Splash Supplement 2010
The House With Three Stories That Might be Five
after sculpture by American artist Edward James
At
night, I stand
outside his bedroom door,
palms up on the cool wall of the
hallway between us, silently guarding the
head of his bed, and pray. I pray for deliverance, for
10,000 angels to protect my son while he sleeps, that first night
home from the state hospital. And in the faint light of the new day
I can see where my broken nails have made eight perfect half-moons in the drywall.
Across the hall,
his sister tosses
in her sleep.
While we were home, my mother told us just before his birthday Dad had asked which birthday this was going to be and she said, well, which one do you think it's going to be? And he said, 73. And she said, no, Conrad, you're going to be 79. Not 73. And he looked sorta confused for a minute and then asked how old she was, so when she told him he said, well you must have had a birthday recently too. It was then she realized he had completely failed to understand what all of us were calling her for, back at the beginning of May.
Beside her bed
my mother's ancient
bureau drawers are locked.
One morning over coffee, Mom told me my great-grandmother's farm had been sold. The man who bought it had decided to tear down the old house and put up a modular unit instead. My Uncle Sonny had gone over to help. When they excavated the crawlspace beneath the old bedroom, though, some bones were found. “Really,” I said. “What kind of bones?” Oh, they were a man's, she said impassively. “So what happened?” Nothing. A sip. “What do you mean, nothing? You mean to tell me human remains were found at a dig site and nobody called the authorities?” Well, Sonny said he thought they were an Indian's, so I guess they just covered them back up. Just then in their bedroom I could hear the key turning in the old bureau lock.
S. Shields is an emerging poet from Atlanta, Georgia, whose work has appeared in the usual variety of small-press publications since about 2001. Other places work has appeared include Raintown Review; Illumen; The Lyric; freefall; The Road Not Taken, A Review of Formal Poetry. A debut book Daimonion Sonata was published letterpress in 2005 by Birch Brook Press. His work has been twice nominated for the Pushcart. Some of his competitive achievements include first place in the Helen Schaible Sonnet Competition, sponsored by the Poets' Roundtable of Chicago (2005), and an honorable mention in the annual New England Shakespearean Sonnet Competition (2009).