by Mary Lou Buschi
We told stories with our eyes closed. Peeled grapes
passed around to signify eyeballs. Cold spaghetti
spilling into our laps—the boy’s disemboweled intestines.
That year, we were making gifts for the elderly.
I had never seen one, an elderly.
My gift was a gigantic corsage, pointy stiff leaves
like stars, held together with floral tape.
We were each given one name—Helen.
The name, a wooden box filled with pressed leaves
and fireflies sliding through summer mist.
*
We filed through the doors
of Pine Acres, through a wall of heat
as street lamps drew slits on the bare floor.
Start singing, the scout master said. Only our voices
holding us up. I was 8 that day.
The men and women in those blue foam beds, wearing their skin
like thin sacks, were somewhere else,
driving fast through all of their firsts.
It was winter, the road out, a solid black river. Where was Helen?
*
That morning the ice was weaving Victorian lace curtains over my window.
Its stubborn geometry—impossible to part.
*
Helen, after delivering my gift,
I will board my bus and get back to myself.
I held her name in my palm. Helen.
I held the name in my mouth. Helen.
You will take the gift and I will be free. Helen, looking only
at the holly leaves, avoiding me, the origin,
took the gift and placed it in her mouth.
I was 8 that day and that woman had nothing to do with me.
Mary Lou Buschi’s chapbook, “The Spell of Coming (or Going),” was selected as the winner of The NYC Siren Series and was published by Patasola Press (2013). Her poems have appeared or are appearing in Willow Springs, Cream City Review, RHINO, Tar River Poetry, The Laurel Review, and Indiana Review, among others. She is a special education teacher in the Bronx.
Editor’s note (Brandon): Every time I read this poem I fall deeper into it. Mary Lou has done a wonderful job weaving together so much below the surface of “Scouts.” Questions and dilemmas of obligation, of relationship and distance, all interconnected and viewed through the prism of memory. The responsibility the speaker feels to deliver the gift to Helen coupled with the anticlimactic reaction she receives furthers the poem’s haunting tone; Helen, with her physical closeness and mental distance, has become a part of the speaker. And thus, like many great poems, more questions are raised than answered: What do we do with an expectation unfulfilled? In what manner do our various interactions affect the person we become? This poem is a gorgeous depiction of the complexity that builds around us and is twisted by time, that “stubborn geometry—impossible to part.”
Swarm 