Salvation Sonnet
BY STEVEN ESPADA DAWSON
Almost sweetly the judge gaveled away my summer,
knocking her desk lightly like a quiet neighbor’s door.
I worked three hundred hours at a Salvation Army—
their motto Blood and Fire. Our small misfit militia,
teenagers unearthing ourselves from the stacks
of stuff left behind, piecemeal Lego sets, doll houses
with missing balconies. Some people would donate
anything for a write-off: prosthetic limbs, uncle’s ashes
mistaken for a daisy vase, countless dildos, dildoes, dildi.
I learned the Spanish word—consolador, from to console.
We took fishing pictures with the biggest and brightest,
threw them in a box we hid from management like a pile
of armless crosses. When I cup my ear towards that
summer, I can sometimes hear them shiver back to life.
What I Hate Most About Mom
BY STEVEN ESPADA DAWSON
is her dying. How these days
I’m busy reckoning
how to make a family
from just one man.
I see death everywhere.
A banana peel left
to the sun is a bat’s
cadaver. The accent mark
in every beautiful Spanish
word—la poesía—is a switch
-blade at the belly.
I can look at the knot
in a piece of wood
until it frightens me.
It’s November now,
all the leaves are curled
with drought. I lied
before. What I hate
most about my dying
mother is that she
won’t eat garlic.
In these final weeks
I try to impress her
with my cooking. She turns
each meal she won’t eat
into a rhymed couplet—
When I meet death,
I won’t have bad breath.
I’m still learning from her
how to laugh at this poem.
How to turn each bridge
into a balcony. To applaud
everything that floats
down river. Depending
which way you turn,
the water is coming
or it has already left.
