CONSTELLATION
In the sun on the black asphalt each star glints like glass.
Behind the house in the wash the boy traps a rattlesnake on the dappled concrete.
A forked stick pins its head while its stalk writhes before the blade
separates it into flashes. I watch from the yard – violence a storm cloud
a hard breeze. A decade later my brother puts his fist through every window in the house
to prove a point about schizophrenia. We call the cops
and they take him clear him disable him put him on all the meds
that meth loves. In that backyard I remember a chicken too, several.
For a while at least. Fresh eggs for a while before the delicate white
float of feathers after necks snapped in cold slaughter.
The trees got sick first. Leaves shed as soon as they budded then branches fell
around us while we wheeled the other in a stolen shopping cart into the cinderblock wall
mottled in chickenshit, blood, and mud. We hacksawed the baskets off so they were
just wheeled metal sleds posted by rough stakes of open edges of right ascension and declination.
The six-lane road out front claimed our dogs. Bruno a dopey two-hundred-pound St. Bernard
split with such force and velocity his bloody body burst open shattered and constellated
across the asphalt. It was, then, at the time, the most blood I had ever seen.
CALL BOX
You just left.
I’m driving
away.
Who picks up
highway call boxes
and what does the room
look like
where they wait
for your voice
hoping
for minor calamity
but never true catastrophe:
just to be needed
one more time:
a blowout, or an
overheating motor,
a cracked block. True casualty
is a different number.
When I moved
to the south
people called car accidents
wrecks. I wonder
where people
who pick up
those lines
live.
I want it
to be
small, suburban
lawns, birds, a baby
feeding cradled tight
while the receiver
is pinched between
shoulder and neck.
Food on the stove,
something
in the oven.
Yes, these people
bake. Maybe even
a small child playing
in the cord.
Let me have my fantasies.
The operators says,
shoo, get.
I’m busy.
Working,
this person needs
our help.
Nik De Dominic is a poet and essayist. He is the author of the full-length collection Goodbye Wolf (The Operating System, 2020) and the chapbook Your Daily Horoscope (New Michigan Press, 2015). Work appears in Guernica, DIAGRAM, Bennington Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. He is the Poetry Editor of the New Orleans Review and a founding editor of the digital poetry chapbook publisher The Offending Adam. De Dominic is an Associate Professor of Writing at the University of Southern California, where he co-directs the Dornsife Prison Education Project. He lives in Los Angeles.