Scribbles
chinook
teaching my daughter
to ride a bike
On advice of counsel I refrain from referring to your mother’s big hair around you. The wreck of sex with no recompense. Fortunately for all three of us the pre-school is open year-round. That weird name on North Main: Scribbles. Looney Tunes: Bugs, Daffy, Elmer Fudd. Fists on your hips at three like Jessica Rabbit in an evening gown at the holiday party, scowl on your dewy face. Potty trained. Philip Seymour Hoffman as Capote as Smokey the Bear as clean-shaven Santa. Sitting on his lap with a candy cane. The lurking threats. You can Google it.
You’re eleven, we’re camping on the green mesa. We learn how they slept in the cliffs, grew waterless squash and pintos without cans. Sage, piñon jays, the archeology of impulse. Sweet innocent Giselle on pointe in the desert, promise of the blue sky. The coffee pot on humid mornings, virga in the afternoon. Nothing but crows. Mothers lived here once, believing without angels on their own land, brown from the sun, passing it along through the mesquite smoke. Evolution, shooting stars from ancestral dreams. Wisdom eggs, no dickheads yet.
In DC you meet Dorothy Day, who suggests Arcade Fire for your listening pleasure. The Pope’s surprise arrival in a sort of spaceship. Cherry blossoms along the Mall. The granite of patriarchy: Washington, Lincoln, King. The value of the scribes, how they wrote it all down, the fumbling transparency. Rosaries and graduate school, the pride we all share, good news! You legislate for The Man now, for beef, oil, Wall Street. Can you see me in the mirror? Binoculars around my gobbler. When you come home to visit next week you can help with my diapers.

M F Drummy holds a PhD in historical theology from Fordham University. The author of numerous articles, essays, poems, reviews, and a monograph on religion and ecology, his work has appeared, or will appear, in Allium, Anti-Heroin Chic, Aureation, BRAWL, Emerge, FERAL, Heimat Review, Hibiscus, Main Street Rag, Meetinghouse, Muleskinner Journal, orange juice, Poemeleon, Reverie, Spare Parts, Winged Penny Review, and many others. Originally from Massachusetts, he and his way cool life partner of over 20 years enjoy splitting their time between the Colorado Rockies and the rest of the planet. He can be found at: Instagram @miguelito.drummalino Website https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/m_f_drummy
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