Someone told me: dips in the lawn
indicated a bear hole. I passed along
on the sidewalk in mortal fear
of a grizzly emerging to chase my
skinny child body home.
My father got drunk on Saturday nights.
There went the paycheck. We lost
the phone and then the car.
He’d hunt to put food on the table. A
nail on the post at the bottom of the
basement stairs snagged
a squirrel’s body just right so it
would dangle, dead, over
opened newspaper. He’d skin it in
one yank, and the guts would land
on the floor. Dark bloody muscle mixed
with the smell of newsprint
under an open light bulb: dinner.
I preferred butter and ketchup on
white-as-snow Wonder bread. The
wonder was that I didn’t die of malnutrition,
Or the shiney black panther creeping
up the basement stairs at night,
or the hungry lion outside, escaped from
the circus like on “Lassie”, or those
menacing bears, arisen from holes in
the lawn to stare into my bedroom window,
ugly mouths watering.
All trying to get me, eat me, the only one
with no real meat on her bones.
Why didn’t my father ever wake up
to shoot them?
Terrified, I’d plan my own escape: I’d run
across the dangerous lawn to use
the neighbor’s phone to call a taxi that
would rescue me for just a dime.
Meanwhile, he slept
full of cheap beer and wild animal flesh,
snoring ignorantly.