After My Grandparents
Kidnap Me They Move
To A New Development
The only scenes I know are Scenes
My mother's parents thought to take
Pictures of. Me in the ditch, my mother's father
In the yard before the fence
Was built, before the lawn was fit
-ted to the Earth's face like a face
After a mauling. He is posing like
A hunter in the dirt
He grips a hoe and kneels in the corpse
Called Everywhere. A neighborhood
Is coming. Where an armed man kneels and grins
That man will build a house
In the House From Which
I Was Kidnapped
The pale blinds rise and fall, a gif forever
The blinds move on their own. At first my father
Stands with the string between his fingers, first
And middle, pulling, even after it tears
Into his fingers, tears the first and mid-
dle skin, him pulling, letting go, his blood
Staining the length of the looped string near-
est him. He pulls the string for years
Eventually he backs away from the window
Into the room. He doesn't turn. Now
He watches from a shadow in the room
For a small child to be returned to him
I see him watching from deeper in the shadow
Whenever I look into his eyes. The shadow grows the way a
child grows
I Have Mixed My Labor With the Soil
Back at the old house, the woods, no entry now
How much remains if any of my blood
And skin in the forest up the hill? Unend-
ing the humiliations so small you
Can't talk about them or they stop being true
Such as sound loyal in your head
And do betray you on your tongue. It is my bod-
y still, more mine than when how long ago
I bled at war in the woods with boys I wanted
To like me so I let them hurt me there
I wore a helmet from the army surplus store
Hoping I would be hunted
And shot in the head, hoping I'd hear the BB strike
To squeeze through brambles my own blood made thick
My Mother Was A Dancer
I danced with the boy in the yard, my mother watching us
He held his left hand high, but too far back
As if it had been photographed mid-wave
And frozen by the attentive flash
As if he once had meant to swing it down, and now
Couldn't, a fear I knew and couldn't name
For years, but bodied by my mother's gaze
Gripped it, and wouldn't let it go
He turned to her, and, crying, shouted wasn't she
Going to do anything? My mother's teeth
Parted. But what she said I didn't hear
Again I struck his bleeding eye
____________________
Shane McCrae
The Many Hundreds of the Scent
Farrar, Straus, Giroux 2023
