Back to Issue Fifty-Nine

Tonight, my son, stalling for time
as he does every night before brushing his teeth,
picks up a large plastic zip tie from the bathroom floor—
part of the packaging for the giant TV
my husband impulsively bought because the news
is so bad we can’t stop watching—
and my son, scarecrow-haired from this evening’s bath,
holds up the zip tie and asks
Mama, do police really use these for handcuffs?
And I, absent-minded and then suddenly minding,
answer Yes…when there is a crowd or rally or…
rebellion—all those r’s eliding, disguising intent—
and they want to arrest a lot of people at once,
and I’m suddenly thinking of my daughter,
age twelve, squinting into the sun as she held her sign
—Politicians, Take Action!—
high above her head and we walked behind
on the tree-lined street with all the singing people
and the armored officers milling casually
amongst themselves, wielding their grins
and clubs, and my son asking then
Mama, why are the men in bullet vests here?
as now he fingers the cut edge
of the zip tie with its beveled underside designed
to first slip smooth and then catch fast
in the rectangular slot at its own end,
allowing you to pull it one way only
into an ever-tighter loop and asks
Do you think these hurt more than the metal kind?
And never having been cuffed or tied, I pause,
trying to consider the relative tensile strength
and coefficient friction of injection-molded plastic
vs. steel—there must be an equation for this,
but I barely scraped through algebra—
as he decides These ones, Mama, I think would hurt more
because they’re sharp. And as he hands me
their small noose, what rough beast do I see
shaded behind him on the already mildewed
vinyl shower lining I put up last week
to hide the water damage from a decades-old leak,
and how did the zip tie end up here
on the bathroom floor, anyway—its dumb white curl
a punctuation to every question I want to ignore
this late on a school night when the routine
should be routine—teeth, lullaby, a kiss goodnight—
not close quarter combat crowd control,
but instead I freeze, toothbrush in hand,
trying to read some future in this debris
of plastic, soap scum, and mold I should be mother enough
to scrub away, erasing all traces of the before,
but who has the time or proper solvents and, good lord,
how will we ever get to sleep?