Rise Up Review
Young Boy Trying to be A Pirate
To Shane
I feel like a heart without a body, a clock
without hands, tick tick tick. This much
I know, December: the sky bursts & rain
strikes pavement like rounds - AK-47,
Pow Pow Pow echoing through a schoolyard,
screams glow & dim like search lights. This
is how it feels to lose you; & now, still, white
silence.
Grief. In a dream, the dead rise-up, walk
across water. I go to the window & wait,
searching for the shape of you. Even Jesus
had a second coming. Across the lawn,
I wave to a boy who is not my son. I love you;
I mouth. He is dragging a sword through mud,
knee deep in runoff, it takes him longer to reach
my yard than it does for me to finish my cigarette.
From behind the boy, his mother, pressing her
hand into the soft of his, look at you, she yells,
yanking him free of rain-soaked earth. I rush
from house to storm, hear him cry, I want
to be a pirate. As salt/tears mix with fresh/water,
I look down into the muddied pond, his mother’s
face appears as a reflection beside my own. I love
you, I whisper, this time to no one in particular.
—Sheree La Puma
Sheree La Puma is an award-winning writer whose personal essays, fiction and poetry have appeared in or are forthcoming in Heron River Review, The Rumpus, O:JA&L, Plainsongs, The Main Street Rag, Burningword Literary Journal, I-70 Review, Inflectionist Review, Levee, The London Reader, Bordighera Press - VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, Gravel, Foliate Oak, PacificReview, Westwind and Ginosko Literary Review, among others. She received an MFA in Writing from
California Institute of the Arts and taught poetry to former gang members.
