Forecast

by April Salzano

Rain is washing earth with something
like pity falling
on my son’s rusty bicycle, training
wheels and all. He is almost nine. Autistic.
July is screaming, summer
is almost over, and third grade is coming
with its threat of tantrums and more
1:1 instruction.
The chicken coup does not have any
chickens and the fresh coat of paint will run
brown into green
grass. Thoughts intrude on my visual.
My friend’s son is going to die,
tubular sclerosis will claim his brain and all
I want to know is will there be a secret
sense of relief buried
in the sorrow, a tiny crack in the loss?
I wonder if night will breathe gratefulness
into lungs collapsed from mourning,
because she does not have to watch anymore
deterioration that lasted decades and spoke
words that no mother wants to hear
in the negative, words like hope
and cure, words like function and love.
And love and love and love.

Come to the Flashing Lights, Avonte

by April Salzano

I am chanting, along with his mother’s
recorded voice that calls, broadcast
into the air from a mobile command truck,
her desperation hidden, her fear, only
partially captured so he will not run
if he hears it.
It’s Mom, I am saying it with her.
Because he has been gone for 13 days.
Because he is autistic.
Because so is my son.
Because if Avonte comes to the flashing lights,
this family will no longer have to wonder
who is hurting him in ways even at 14 he cannot
understand. They will not face what I would
like to call the unfathomable, but fellow warriors
know better. It is the first and worst thought
on our minds, but it is always fathomable, always
lurking in the foreground, blocking what should be
moments of peace needed on a level
I will not try to explain
because my sisters understand.
Just as they understand
if Avonte comes home, I too can stop crying.
They will forgive my selfish tears
because they know
Avonte’s coming home
means it is possible for my son
to be okay if only our second worst fear comes true.

His Mother’s Pasture

by April Salzano

is perimetered by cornfields, rolls with Pennsylvania
gentleness and arguable boundaries. Late June, the first
cut of hay has been bailed. Round bundles rest
on small summits, a field’s thirsty punctuation
with logicless placement. The cattle are decades gone,
the trough, arbitrary and dry. The Marcellus shale men
have come back with gas leases for farmers to sign.
They haven’t seen grass this green since the steel plants
shut down. Even the ghosts have given up on this town.
Where sky meets field, far from the noise of the interstate
from which we are just a place on the way someplace
else, far from the latent commerce of the few remaining
diesel engines that moan in the night like lost calves,
a space exists. A thin line of in-between holds its ground.
Peace intersects every acre like a scythe slicing
grass just dry enough to call hay.

1992 Dodge Shadow

by April Salzano

Gaudy aqua. Base model, an understatement.
No stereo, not even a factory-cut hole.
Stick shift, no AC, no rear defrost, no floor
mats. $7000 for that new car smell
I had never inhaled so deeply.
At $5/hour as a shift manager
at McDonalds, I could swing payments,
commute to a commonwealth campus, still pay
for textbooks and a stereo system.

Two years and one snow belt later,
I transferred to a campus in a city on a hill, reversed
often to gain enough speed, make a run for it, downshifted,
failed. The little engine that could often could not
when confronting lake effect snow. The windows
froze on the inside, and often
sealed shut as if in effort at self-preservation. Cranks
broken: 3 while trying to get a crack open to blow
cigarette smoke out along with my breath,
Alanis riding shotgun, one hand
in the most metaphorical of pockets.
That car eluded any attempt at being named,
other than with various profanities.
I associate it with many near-death experiences,
and the best days of my life
I didn’t even know were happening.

Jettie

by April Salzano

Who lets a dog freeze to death? My father
was supposed to put straw in the dog houses.
The shepherd survived, though he was never
quite the same animal, but the beagle
solidified, standing still, his mouth a permanent,
petrified howl. We were two hours away
at my great grandmother’s, maybe for a funeral,
maybe for our annual visit. When my father called,
my mother’s voice held its usual resignation.
It was my four-year-old brother
she was worried about telling. Nothing surprised
the rest of us. Life was just like that, one moment
there was sun, the next, a chill to the bone.

Without Humor

by April Salzano

Some things are funny
after the passage of enough time, a lost shoe,
a toy rescued from the toilet, tripping
up the stairs, or over nothing, getting lost
and being late for the first day of a new job,
my friend kicking all the spindles out
of her banister like a deranged ninja,
then blaming a plastic horse for her broken toes,
my sister’s husband breaking up with her
on a legal pad note the day Dimebag Daryl
got shot, her mourning the latter
more than the former, the drug test
I drank six gallons of water to pass,
my near death from hydroencephalitis,
the earth tipping violently on its axis
then splashing back. Even that
is funny now.

But some things, no matter how
ironic, never reach that place. You will never
hear anyone say, honey, remember that trip
to London I put a lien against the house to take,
then ended up meeting my affair and ruining
our marriage? Or, remember that one time
our son was diagnosed with autism?
Or for another family, that trip to the zoo
where you balanced our only son on a railing
over an 11 foot drop, then bent down
to get something and he fell
into the African painted dog exhibit
and was mauled to death? The dingoes
ate your baby is no longer funny. I imagine
the loss that mother feels because I can’t not
imagine it. His arms over his face,
his body curled to protect vital organs. Pure
instinct surrounding inevitability.
The dogs, consuming easy prey,
people who would
later be called witnesses, screaming,
the man who couldn’t
jump in, one leg dangling over the edge,
his own will to survive keeping him
suspended like the zookeepers, in hesitation.

My son has stood on many ledges,
fallen, run away, gone under, faced his own
painted dogs, who, for whatever reason,
did not attack, but turned in retreat.
It’s funny how things work out.
And then it isn’t funny at all, but a result
of something so invisible you have
no choice but to be grateful.

Touching Tears

by April Salzano

These tears. These wailing howling driving on the highway
tears. Singing with Seger tears. Shame on the moon, roll me away,
distance tears. My father just died, we never made peace tears.

And these tears. Cliché tears. Rolling down cheeks tears. What would be
legitimately described as spilling tears, the can’t be single
splatter, can’t find the beauty in tears.

And these tears. Tears of loss, all out wailing without tears tears.
Soundless, forced tears. Husband had an affair tears. Nowhere
to go, mascara stained, life on autopilot tears. Out of options
bankrupt, loss of soul-mate tears.

And these tears. Cradling life against breast tears. Let this moment
last dear jesus please tears. World split wide open, ready for anything,
hopeful tears. Blind to the future tears. Grateful, gorgeous fat, world
under water tears.

And these tears. Tears of laughter. Someone’s ass crack is showing
in the casino tears. Falling like quarters from a slot machine, spacebag
infomercial, no one else would understand, best friend tears.

And these tears. Tears of nostalgia, old photo, painful, cathartic
tears. Wish I could take it back tears. Can’t believe that was my life,
old wedding bands in the jewelry box, I miss you tears.

Those tears. And these tears.

State Route 208

by April Salzano

Stalactite ceilings. Orange shag
carpet. Plastic runners on
the steps. A split
entry. A patio door, but no patio. The blue
room was uneventful, shared
between my younger sister and me. The green
held my sleepwalking brother
who traveled all night. At four,
he didn’t get it, the sense of danger
of wandering across enemy lines
and into my parents’ room
in the basement, a dungeon complete
with sleeping dragon. The red
room stunk because my older sister pissed
the bed. She knew something
of fear. We rented a year. Played
in the mazes of corn and tried to
pretend we had horses. We rode them
all day, challenging them to fly us elsewhere.

This Place

by April Salzano

You ask how much I want you. With a consistency            
that tears at my skin, centrifugal spin                      
to my core. I want your touch on my body my mind
your breath in my mouth, open,
quiet. I belong to you already. I remain still,          
uneasy, unsettled. How often can I
touch you before you vanish like light edging
at the blinds, before the sullen fog of morning reaches      
in to take you back, leaving me wet from your tongue,
drunk from your smell, tracing my way back to my own
reality, a place I barely recognize.

Ask me tomorrow. Ask me a year from now. Ask me
to describe how it feels once I’ve gotten
what I wanted, taken what wasn’t mine.
Ask me then when you know my fear of failure
overrides my stubborn refusal to relent. Ask me when
we’ve finished consuming each other, breaking silences into
sound, heroically battling each other’s ghosts
back down where they came from. Ask me

when we’ve finished memorizing
our respective lines, scars, the place
I twice tore open and was sewn back together,
the eyes inked into your weathered skin, watching
me watch you. Ask me when
the engine has finished killing the track. I cannot
define my reasons while I am still
carrying you around, a half formed idea, something
I created on my own. I cannot

reach you where you are. I am again consuming
leftovers, half eaten ghost rations, discarded.
And I am tired. I have already waited through this season
in another life, its weather blowing a restless black wind,
its sun scalding my skin, which I would sooner crawl
out of than be this untouched. I have been here before

crouched in a dark hole waiting to be found. Waiting through
the words of a language
I do not know, a dialect I never learned, cannot
translate or articulate, whose words promise to bring you here,      
to make you rush headlong to where
I exist, waiting.
Waiting for you to come,
not back, but forward, to this place you have never been.
This place is who I am. I am this place.
It is where I will be, waiting.  In spite of myself.
I am inside this place and I do not
            know how to
                                    find my way back out.

For My Dead Father

by April Salzano                       

I called you from my pocket this morning. My phone
dialed random contacts, yours among them. As if
I could summon you from the dead to wish
you Merry Christmas. As if
I could tell you now what I never told you
while you were alive. And now,
maybe it’s the holiday lights or the cold
so harsh it hurts like some lost fragment of time,
but I miss you. I didn’t have time to love you
before your kidneys finally failed,
before dialysis stopped working,
before the last breath
slipped from your exhausted lungs
like smoke.

How is it that I managed to
resent your angry hands, your
bad temper, your rattlesnake wit, your sadistic
sense of humor, but never managed to
love behind my anger, to admire beneath my surface? How
is it that I let slide
the times I could have told you, but sat silent
instead, watching you fall asleep in your chair
as I gawked at the pulsing port that allowed
bad blood to be made clean and put back in? It took
hours to drain you, longer for you to recover
each time. You had been tired
for years. You had been trying to tell me something
I was not willing to hear.

There is a part of me that reaches for you
that holds you and strokes the yellow
ash of your skin, that watches the corners
of your eyes wrinkle when
you smile, every time I am hurt,
every time I am kicked
when I am already down. A justice you could never
set right, a cross you felt obligated to bear.
I had in mind a catharsis
 that never materialized at your death.
I mocked you
while I was learning from you.
I resented you for not loving
me enough. I heard you outside and I
didn’t let you in. I am carrying you now,
and you are heavy though whittled
to half your size. I am holding on tight
even though it’s too late. I am
holding and I will not let you go.