The Contortionist

His pudgy flesh held taut by his neck-bone
like fish squirming against skin in a jet stream
driven in from the highway. I won’t Mammy,
the boy hisses, where i’ she? The man squares: Your momma
- somewhere better, the man bites off—
thinking on the pale face—her fevered cheeks
drained of life. Every road he passes
runs together:
Goodwill Hope, Hope Church Mountain,
Goode’s Country. Beams Truelight Baptist.

C’mon, the man says, his fingers circling
the little arm,
fingernails biting back. Limbs wriggle to strike sixty to
twenty degrees,
to one hundred and eighty angles.
The boy’s back digs through his stomach, trying
for his sudden release. No, escapes his lips, the darts
clutching
at empty air. Then, the man grabs and drags the limp boy
through stained glass being suffocated in muggy pews;
brown
breath from antique crosses,
barely diluted by modernity.

Sit, the man commands,
the two crucifixes framing
his scarecrow suit, rearranging the crooked stained tie.
The diseased glow of the sun paints pictures
across the glossy lacquered woodwork
so the boy squanders his time, the feet lifted on the pew
performing acrobatic stunts in the shadow
of the man kneeling,
the sweat dripping down through his ragged gray trousers.

The man slumps beside the boy,
one of the boy’s legs
rounding his left ear. The man slaps the leg,
show some respect. The boy repeats,
I wont Mammy.
The man points at the empty bench. The boy frowns
to creep up the aisles, dusty eyes staring through him
on his walk to the wooden box. He looks in: Mammy?

The hair appears waxy and her eyelids
seem to hide cobwebs.
He is too embarrassed to run,
twisting with his toes
cutting back and forth,
waiting for the man to take him away.
That not mammy, he whispers later. The man looks at him
twisting pretzels in the backseat,
and holds his tongue.