The Lamppost Glows Orange in the Daytime

By Hannah Srajer

After Larry Levis’s “The Cry”

Then, everything rusted.
Little cream and pink houses
rusted by nonstop sprinklers,
mice rusted to the dark
soil in their burrow holes.
The ants rusted to red brick.
On Lenox, the lamppost
glowed orange in the daytime.
My littlest brother sat in the room
facing the backyard, rusting out
answers to impossible math problems.
In my father’s suit closet, the clean ties
rusted to old hooks. Mars, hidden
in the sky, rusted for the last
hundred thousand years.
In the red living room,
eggs deviled on an open plate.
My mother rusted to her black velvet dress,
her exposed ankles like two
hard, yellow-white teeth.
The women my father slept with
sang a song out of an open window,
the frame rusting in the wet morning.
We kept the notes dangling
on the front porch in long metal
tubes, a wind chime we hear
only when we are very
quiet, still in our mourning clothes.

Notes:

This piece is included in Respect the Mic: Celebrating 20 Years of Poetry from a Chicagoland High School, edited by Hanif Abdurraqib, Franny Choi, Peter Kahn, and Dan Sullivan. Published by Penguin Workshop. All poems are copyright of their respective authors.

Source: Poetry (December 2021)