Dom Fonce: 2 Poems
Song for George
Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasure.
—Rainer Maria Rilke
The roads were gravel, pill bottles
chimed in the wind, and I was
an 8-year-old given the latchkey, free
to make mud castles in the yard and catch
frogs under my shirt. Cousin George—high
and brain-fried—played too, moved
his old Cavalier out back and shot at it
with a rifle all day long as if tomorrow
made a promise never to come. He cursed
his hands whenever it jammed, his voice
as coarse as a stone swirling in a coffee tin.
I watched his muscles spasm with each sprung
casing, the dangling Newports ashing themselves
off his lips. I gathered his beer cans like fallen
coins and stacked them in the woods, thinking
the meager droplets left behind were elixir
on my tongue, then stole the BB gun
from the neighbor’s shed—in this fantasy, I was sure
I was drunk and dangerous like him, I was a ball
of fire like him. From a distance, the bangs echoed
in my ears, as I flung the cans into the air, picking
them off while they hovered within the clouds. Between
each massive bang, my small ting mimicked in turn—big,
small—until a stray dropped a cardinal, soft
as a pillow, from a tree. It flapped, squirmed,
and squawked as blood rushed into its lungs. With leaking
palms, I pumped five times and popped it from its suffering, staring
down at its lifelessness, blinking three times, not knowing
what else to do, not understanding why the air
around me fell as silent as a rest-starved eyelid.
Beetle Song
“Yes, of course,” I say to the boy
as summer fevers the cement—burning
each child’s foot while they scramble to snag
ants from the dirt—as a mother dances
with her daughter in the pool.
I see you, a sable
thumbprint, clamping onto the small
of the girl’s back. I hear you slice your buzz
through the swarms of laughter.
A boy with grass-stains
on his knees calls out, “Do you think this is
real gold?” Another boy cries to God, asking why
he’s never the one to find treasure.
In a memory, a beetle medallion is dangling in
the gypsy market when I am ten, when the Ohio
sun sieves through the tapestry-thin tent—I’m sure,
when the swaying woman draws near, kissing my
willowy cheek, its flaxen-green
flickers in her pupil. “It’s pure gold,” she tells me,
as my father sacrifices his wallet for my smile.
It is a birthmark that pecks
at my collar, a brand-burn on my neck—
until the chain inevitably breaks, and the yard
swallows it like a seed.
So, now, the mother brushes
you from her child like a spill
from a table, and you land
on my shoulder, humming secrets
into my ear.
The boy with filthy hands
pulls on the pocket of my
jeans—“Is this real gold?”
I remember asking my father
that same question years ago—a fleeting
“Yes, of course” bumbling off his tongue, and I feel
my father’s voice jump through my teeth.
Dom Fonce is a poet from Youngstown, Ohio. He is the author of Here, We Bury the Hearts (Finishing Line Press, 2019). He is the Editor-in-Chief of Volney Road Review. His poetry has been published in the Tishman Review, Obra/Artifact, Burning House Press, Black Rabbit Quarterly, Italian Americana, 3Elements Review, Junto Magazine, America’s Best Emerging Poets 2018: Midwest Region, and elsewhere.