Birthday

Rich Entel
Cardboard Menagerie 

Birthday

It’s heavy to drag, this big sack of what
you should have done.  And finally
you can’t lift it anymore.
…You never intended
that it should come to this.
William Stafford
"It’s heavy to drag, this big sack..."

Somewhere out in the world there’s a thirty
three year old who took you
up after you left, who was shocked

like your cheek from the combustion of
gunpowder breaching your skull and
even your jaw, (the heavy

pistol slid and you were awake
the whole way only to slip first
coma then no.)  And maybe it wasn’t like

you’d planned it, maybe what
you’d intended had nothing
to do with her and maybe it was

instead all the carefully folded clothes
you carried from room
to room when your sister ran

the streets and your mother
walked and walked and called
down those Lynn alley drain

pipes into the raw meat
of the night and maybe it was
that you missed them

both and knew they’d never make it
back, not really.  Realizing that
and days and days getting ready,

you waited for something to change
your mind.  But the house
was perfect

and still as a trusting child
who looks into the face of the one
who will hurt them (though how

could they know?) and feels

nothing but trust at first, and then dead
shock at the epicenter
how it all stops to pause

not really sure what happened,
or if it really did, or now how to take it,
the burn of being opened

with an explosion, the hot
barrel of the gun stinking
on the white rag rug

in your mother’s bedroom
and you the only one
feeling the split of you clean

through and through, a sudden
invisible living thrust into the miles
of another life a continent away

maybe, the sear of bringing it in
like breath, the first one
puncturing the throat open like a bullet.