1.

     Your mother is shrinking. We went to her house last April for spring break because you love her more than you love your father, like you said, and she loves you more than she ever loved him, like you said. But your mother’s back is breaking with the weight of your guilt, and her rib cage is caving in with your sadness that she can’t wipe away.
     Your mother lives in the grandeur of all her own, and you live in the splendor of memories of your father’s American mistresses and Irish whiskeys. We had a pleasant conversation about it by the fir trees the day you went to the creek to skip stones because you’re just a child who never really had a childhood.
     She began, “Men are all the same.”
     I said, “I know.”

2.
     Lenny’s is dead without Carson. Anyone could see that. We hadn’t gone in in almost two months, but anyone could tell that Carson was gone because the band was angrier and no one did anything when they were finished with their gig. I spoke to the lead singer, her name was Callista, and she didn’t want to talk about it at first, but I bought her three drinks, and you know the way beer makes people.
     She said that Carson had gone to Nevada because he didn’t like bars anymore, didn’t think he could be limited to them, and it had broken her. “Goddamned Carson,” she mumbled with her back slumped and her fingers tracing the water rings on the wood. “He used to make the crowd cry.”
     My glass was cooling, left somewhere between lukewarm and undesirable. You have to be sober to hear some stories.
     Callista said, “We have a new guitarist. His name is Emory and he is transgender. But he don’t make the crowd cry.” Then she said, “And Benji’s getting so big, Carson would hardly recognize him. I think it’s mean, leaving your own baby like that, and it makes me sad that Benji screams for his daddy’s arms even when he’s in mine.”
     Giorgio the drummer rubbed her shoulder and then we left because old drunks in green flannels and 5 o’clock shadows were glancing at you.

3.
     “Baby,” she says when everything is over and there is nothing to do but rock away the hurt in her toddler son’s head, “you’re alright. We’re alright.”
     Her son has tan skin all around, the color of hardened honey. She had tried to keep him inside years ago, to pale his skin, but infants are all the same, and men are all the same.
     He toddler son says, “Daddy’s mean.”
     She hears no sadness in his voice, no hiccupping from crying, no anger from injustice. She smoothes his straight black hair because sometimes children are the most honest of all people and she says very quietly in the way that she does, the way that makes everything seem subtle but salient, “Daddy is mean, but you can’t be too.”

4.
     The day the world surprised me was your father’s birthday. For years, you had just called him in the afternoons to wish him well, but that year, you said you were going out to dinner with him to celebrate the big six-zero. I was typing up letters when you said this and I checked the time. It was 6:14. You left at 6:30. I expected you back by 8:30 because people lie and don’t ever change, don’t you know this? But you were gone until midnight. When you came back, you looked happy.

5.
     People are just a multitude of poems. You are poetry, but your lines are all about the same tragedies. It will be a matter of time before you realize that there should be and are ways to live without ever going back. Your mother folds your clothes into perfect squares to be packed away into suitcases for the future. She hauls his out onto the sidewalk.