Loading...
Poetry
Dorianne Laux:
Foster Child
I didn't know my father owned a gun
until the day Jimmy came into the garage
hopping on one foot, his black high top
filling with blood. I don't remember much--
how the cops got called, where they took him,
if he got put on restriction-- all I could see was
the fine red stream slipping down his shoe lace,
mixing with the rainbow oil in the big silver pan
my father drove the car over to let it tick off to sleep.
And later, the cast, blind-white and hard, his toes
squirming like dirty worms, a bald knee
peeking out over the ragged lip. He was already
old when my mother took him in, wild, she said,
her job to tame him. Love, she told us, was all
it took. Young still when he left to live
at the boy's home, away from matches and cans
of gasoline, kitchen knives and dirty magazines,
stolen cigarettes and zip-lock baggies of pot,
my mothers sweaty beers. Maybe he lived
with us for a year, long enough for us to start
calling him brother, to recognize the sound
of his bike coming up the driveway, our playing
cards clothes-pinned to the wheel frame, clacking,
braking hard to send out a wing of gravel with the slide
of his back tire, long enough to see the cast
removed, the wound healed over, the scar deep
and perfectly round, exactly the size of the tip
of my little finger, of the bullet we looked for
and never found.
Dorianne Laux's newest poetry collection, The Book of Men, was published by W.W. Norton in 2011. Her book Dark Charms was published by Red Dragonfly Press in 2010 and Superman: The Chapbook, also by Red Dragonfly Press, was published in January 2008. Her previous and fourth book of poems, Facts about the Moon, published by W.W. Norton in 2005, was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award and winner of the Oregon Book Award. She is also author of three collections of poetry from BOA Editions: Awake (1990), introduced by Philip Levine; What We Carry (1994), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Smoke (2000). She is co-author, with Kim Addonizio, of The Poet's Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry (W.W. Norton, 1997). Her work has appeared in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry and has been twice included in Best American Poetry. She has been awarded a Pushcart Prize, two fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She now lives, with her husband, poet Joseph Millar, in Raleigh, North Carolina, where she serves among the faculty at North Carolina State University.
We went through several different designs before we reached the final product and spent many weeks brainstorming and trying new ideas. Once we worked out the kinks, our class collaborated with the program director, Shelley Washburn, and the authors to achieve the best design for everyone.