What Does My Father Know that I Do Not?
BY APRIL RANGER
When Dad scooped the baby gerbils
and their mother from their cage
and placed them in a shoe box
and buried it in the snow,
did he balance it steady
like the collection plate at church?
Or one-handed, like a box of donuts?
Did they slide to one end
in the tilting dark like passengers
tossed on a sinking ship? Were they
asleep? Or full of spastic noise, eleven
high-pitched protesting squeals,
forty-four fists of claws
scratching the cardboard walls?
Did he plan where to bury them
or decide last-minute: by the tree house
or the mailbox or near the pond with the broken
washing machine, and did he dig a hole
or just heap piles of scaly snow
over the top? And did he use a shovel
or his hands? Were they bare
or did he wear thick gloves?
And did he mumble a prayer or
whisper something true he never told us?
And was it in the heat of madness?
After a phone call from Mom?
And should we blame ourselves?
Should we have kept them with the kinder parent?
Can I say I have a kinder parent?
“It was the humane thing,” he muttered,
his voice heavy and confident,
a garage door rolling shut.
When he left the room,
my brother and sister and I huddled
in my bed and shrouded
a blanket over us.
If god had lifted
my mattress with one hand,
we would have slid
to the headboard, limbs smashed
together like dolls in a suitcase.
If god had buried us
in the snow
below the world where parents
decide the fate of the weak,
it would have been humane.
When Dad scooped the baby gerbils
and their mother from their cage
and placed them in a shoe box
and buried it in the snow,
did he balance it steady
like the collection plate at church?
Or one-handed, like a box of donuts?
Did they slide to one end
in the tilting dark like passengers
tossed on a sinking ship? Were they
asleep? Or full of spastic noise, eleven
high-pitched protesting squeals,
forty-four fists of claws
scratching the cardboard walls?
Did he plan where to bury them
or decide last-minute: by the tree house
or the mailbox or near the pond with the broken
washing machine, and did he dig a hole
or just heap piles of scaly snow
over the top? And did he use a shovel
or his hands? Were they bare
or did he wear thick gloves?
And did he mumble a prayer or
whisper something true he never told us?
And was it in the heat of madness?
After a phone call from Mom?
And should we blame ourselves?
Should we have kept them with the kinder parent?
Can I say I have a kinder parent?
“It was the humane thing,” he muttered,
his voice heavy and confident,
a garage door rolling shut.
When he left the room,
my brother and sister and I huddled
in my bed and shrouded
a blanket over us.
If god had lifted
my mattress with one hand,
we would have slid
to the headboard, limbs smashed
together like dolls in a suitcase.
If god had buried us
in the snow
below the world where parents
decide the fate of the weak,
it would have been humane.
APRIL RANGER is a Boston-based poet and playwright. She performed on Final Stage at the National Poetry Slam as part of the 2008 Boston Cantab Team, and will represent Cantab at the Individual World Poetry Slam in 2011. April has featured her work on stages across the United States. Her poetry has appeared in Off The Coast.