Poem Published in Cold Mountain Review

The Pecking Order


I

Steps from the chain link fence, schoolboys
shove each other below the schoolyard magnolia.
They pelt the runs of pale flowers
spotting the stocky limbs, use fallen pine cones
and rocks and lumps of loose asphalt to pick off
and drop the tree's stubby seed pods.
They split the gathered shells and pocket
the red kernels hidden inside
like lost marbles. No one asks why they do it,
no one counts the dropped or split husks.
They just follow the play some boy started,
yell and fight because someone else did.
They try to seem bigger than they actually are.
They forget what the teachers say
and step over the magnolia blossoms
scattered among the knobby roots like birdseed.


II

Whether they remember or are curious again, C.G. and Ruth Byrd ask Victor Recondo
_____about how he knows Jerry Vines.
We're brothers, he says. That's right--you're brothers, they respond. They do this because
the whole retirement home whispers about this, and are restless with the answer.
_____The Byrds, like every other resident, believe the pair is something
like a married couple; they look over Victor for his "brother's" family looks, but find
nothing to allow what they say to be. They grapple the queer lisp of his Spanish tongue
_____against Jerry's Manhattan-speak,
they compliment his diamond-freckled pinky rings. They inquire, We hear Jerry
_____gets cafeteria takeaway for the both of you, carries it back in a basket.
Jerry brings me a picnic dinner every day, Victor returns. They Byrds and the retirement home
are left with this, whether or not they are restless. Victor tells them they are brothers,
_____and it is different from the salad days. Victor and Jerry take the questions
_____and whispering tenets with their picnic dinner.


III

This is how I heard it. Run off the road, my uncle's
boyfriend in the drainage gulley, barely breathing, the officer

parked beside the curled guard rail and muddied ditch.
My Uncle Darren held Carlos by kneeling behind him

and draping his arms across his heaving chest.
This is what the trooper saw of the two men;

he called in an ambulance for my uncle's boyfriend,
asthma attack; he whispered over his radio to the dispatcher,

said he suspected alcohol or foul play. Carlos
belted to the stretcher, hospital bound--the officer walked

back to the scene, and my uncle ready with questions
and how-is-he-doing's. The trooper fired back

with the sobriety line and tests and further inquiries;
he yelled at my sobbing uncle, "Stop it, goddamn it.

You got no right to hear about him. Stop bitching,
you faggot chicken-shit." Tired of his cries,

the officer wrestled my whimpering uncle
into the backseat; he stepped on the shard of windshield

and car pieces sown along the field ditch and soft shoulder.
"I got no choice, but to take you with me,"

he said to my uncle. "You brought this on you.
You must have been on something."