Anna Derey-Wilson
Battling the Beast
Each day you bring me a wound:
the drill gun whining into the palm,
the way the workrazor separates
skin from muscle or the hammer
sheers nail from bed, and I think
of this as a nation—a strange scar map
like the heavens burrowed into
your flesh and left me directions.
But of course, before there’s a scar
there’s a wound, and stitches, and
the infection flares under the surface
like a secret forge.
You make houses and I make you a
hero because the people who move in don’t
know how much blood is spilled in
their foundations, walls, roofs, how it
drips from your fingers to your cigarette
to the ground. They don’t know you
were there
to see the tree-feller die. It happened like this:
a bad cut in the wood and
then in disaster-hyper-slo-mo: the splintering
trunk hit the back of his head.
When you come home, the wound
rolls off your tongue – the bloody grey
sputtering from his nostrils,
job boss screaming about insurance,
trying to get a dying man to sign
against a lawsuit—how the police slammed
the boss against the hood of his car
just to shut him up,
how the ambulance left without lights.
And I can’t look at you straight on.
I have to cock my head and squint, cross
my eyes or my heart, because here
you are, bleeding into my open palm
burning through the ibuprofen and the
neosporin. Tomorrow the
tree-fellers will demand double or
quit and you’ll put the last of the piping
into this dream home, lawn like
its own nation, no map and no markers
for the fallen, and the job trucks will pack out
to take the war elsewhere.
Fool’s Gold
The summer after kindergarten
the cicadas grow thick on the trees
and I am sure they might be butterflies
cocooned like that
until
right there on the aluminum monkey bars
one splits the back of her shell and sits drying
her eyes as big as the heads of pins.
I go to tell to my father that the aliens are hatching.
he shows me how to hold her,
to put my hand in front of her and wait
until she climbs it, her small clawed feet
tickling my palm.
he tells me to avoid the neighbors with the tire swing
I learn the hard way they trick younger kids
into sitting on it and spin them till they throw up
after that they never wave to me again.
he tells me to memorize my phone number
my address the way to spell my name
the way to say his name, which is not “dad”
but more confusing set of syllables
he hints that all dads have these names
and each one is different.
the roads here have cubes of pyrite
and when the sun is hot enough to melt the asphalt
he picks them out with a pocket knife
we keep them in a greeting card box
as though we are not fools
as though this is the kind of gold the future might need.
Anna Derey-Wilson is an MFA candidate at Minnesota State University, Mankato. When not writing, she enjoys skiing, kickboxing, and exploring the outdoors. You can find her on Instagram at @anderronadventures.