It was the class disasters I enjoyed the most
Simeon Berry
My 11-year-old brother
getting drunk
on dirty rum balls
at the church deacon’s
Christmas Party
and ollieing off
the colonial staircase
as my mother receded behind
a medieval halo of humiliation
and I read C.S. Lewis in the den
underneath the never-opened
leather-bound set of the World’s
Greatest Classics
wondering why the animals
were so weird
Not knowing this
is what happens
when you stuff Paganism inside
a Jesus skin suit
Snow came down outside as if
in a novel
footnoting everything
with little muttered
exclamation points
and I had this tiny undone button
of sadness inside
at the dyspeptic beach duck
T-shirt I wasn’t allowed to buy
because waterfowl
were for girls
and the only humor boys got
stung like antiseptic
and was wrapped
in anonymous malice
like paper around a pound of flesh
Like the cancer test where
they punched you
when you saw if your hand
was bigger than your face
The deacon’s house was
scented with burnished cinnamon
and I loved it
like all the mansions
I’d been suffered to enter
in a post-apocalyptic way
Decorously emptied
of the cashmere-sweatered
inhabitants who didn’t
know
me and my brothers
were only supposed to shower
once a week because we didn’t
have a septic tank
Just an emerald drainage field
where we capered before
the badminton net
and my grandmother paid me
a sweaty quarter
to brush the iridescent asterisks
of Japanese beetles
off the leaves
and into a heady jar of gasoline
Simeon Berry won the National Poetry Series for his first collection of poetry, Ampersand Revisited (Fence Books), and his second book of poetry, Monograph (University of Georgia Press). He has been an Associate Editor for Ploughshares and won a Massachusetts Cultural Council Individual Artist Grant, and his work has appeared in AGNI, Colorado Review, Blackbird, DIAGRAM, The Iowa Review, and many other journals. He lives in Massachusetts and is the Prose Poetry Editor for Pithead Chapel.