Cherubs in the clouds

—for Miles

As kids, we’d try out our names
in the language we made up ourselves
to whisper into the telephone
when one of our fathers came home stinking
of cheap whiskey or another lady’s perfume.
We’d meet on the roof of the abandoned Sinclair
halfway between your house & mine. I’d always bring an apple
& you’d bring the knife your pa got you on your tenth birthday
to gut fish, which you never did. You never had the stomach for it.
We’d take turns cutting the apple, our thumbs against the back
of the blade, the way your pa did, & we’d flip
our names on our tongues
like pennies sharp as a lick of rust.
We’d go back to your house because you had a front porch & a cherry tree,
& your mama would ask
what’s in our mouths, but when we opened wide
there was only blood.
Blood, the color of cherries between our teeth
on that front porch after school in late spring.
How we’d spit the pits
right back into the bowl.
How we’d practice kissing
in the creases of each other's elbows,
& I’m trying to remember
how your jawline fits
into the soft parts of my hands.
I’m trying to remember my hands
that morning my pa took us out to the lake
before dawn to go catfishing. Before we watched
him press a knife into the soft spot
at the center of its head & grief became more
than just a five-letter word. Before the dorsal fin
caught down the side of my palm & pa picked the spines out of me
in the dark.

I think it’s our fathers
who teach us how to cry.

They left
their boots by the front door for us
to stick our feet into, but we’d never fill out
in the ways they did. Our laughs stay in our chests.
We wash our hands in the kitchen sink
& the taste of tobacco washes clean off.

But we’re making do. We’re making love.

Darling boy, let’s finish
what we started.
Let’s practice kissing
on each other’s mouths this time.

I pull up your shirtsleeves & I’m drunk
as a sailor, but I want to see the tattoos you got on your arms
when you left home at seventeen— a plague doctor on one.
Cherubs in the clouds on the other.
We grew up
into our bodies,
but mine’s still the same
old skin, honeyed
& freckled by the August sun. We both planted
our fathers back down into the earth, & I’m sorry
I missed the funeral.
We both still feel our hurt right down in our middles. In the middle
of winter, we drink gin by the firepit
in my hometown. You say you’re thinking
of becoming a trucker & heading east or
a fisherman in Alaska & heading west.
But give me just one day. It’s supposed to snow
all night anyhow. I know I still ask
too many questions. I’m always late.
I’m driving the next state over to place my bets
on all the losing dogs. But say the word & I’m
pressing a dish towel to your bloody nose
in the bathroom of Blind Dog, looking
at a painting above the mirror of a butterfly
in the beak of a cardinal perched in the trees.

I’d never seen a cardinal until I moved
south. You were born in Vermont
& I think maybe I’ll drive north
just to see the colors. No, I think
maybe I’ll go back to California
where the sun sets like spilled
honey, turning all the wet soil sweet.

Say, sugar, come in from the cold,
from the night,
from the snow. You gotta stop
looking back. I promise,
there is no one out there
in the dark.
You walk down the street back toward
the bar in your Metallica jean vest, a cigarette
dangling between your teeth, the end red
as the wing of the cardinal in the dogwood.