Listen: when I was a young boy and my mother
opened a pre-school so she could be near to us,
so she could learn to be a teacher,
to start a new life,
after my oldest friend,
my father,
decided he couldn’t live with us anymore—
when yellow Tupperware started flying
across kitchens, and I hid
under the warm chestnut-igloo
dining table; when our new life
tasted bitter, and the old one,
only halfway out the door—
I pulled the chair out from a boy
and left him on the floor.
He’d stolen my toy.
Or maybe a crayon?
Maybe he only made a face,
an ugly face,
a face harshly lit by fluorescent panels
pocketed with pits,
a flat moon.
What lives in the pits of the moon?
An ugly face—a face my father,
my oldest friend, might make
when making decisions.
Maybe he did nothing at all.
I pulled the chair all the same.
I waited until he stood
to grab something at the table.
I came in behind,
like a marauder,
and I pulled the chair.
He sat in thin air.
He hit the linoleum.
My heart was pounding.
I wiped that look off his face—
that ugly look, if there ever was one—
and now he sat shocked and dumb.
And I had won.
And then he started to cry.
By God, he started to cry,
and my heart sank.
“What did you do?”
my mother cried.
“What did you do?”
And she knelt by his side.
She comforted the boy.
I stood and watched.
I wanted to be angry. I wanted to.
But I was not.
I felt the hot tears in my eyes.
I blinked up at the paneled lights,
at the flat moon.
Who lives in the moon?
Ugly green men with pointed hats
and bells on their socks,
flying around in yellow Tupperware cars.
They live in the moon—
I know. My father showed me once.
I know. I saw it in a cartoon.
