Paula McLain
Elbert
I learned to read backwards by chasing
My cousin Elbert’s name over the concrete brow
Of the stoop. I never met Elbert. Like all boys
He was theoretical—orange sherbet pushed up
And out of the paper cylinder into a neighbor’s driveway.
Ten cents wasted in the time in took to touch your nose.
The sidewalks were white then, a July kind of clean, burned pure
Enough to barefoot. Feet were for reckoning and sisters
Were for bickering and somewhere to lodge a dissolving
Prayer. Each city block was its own science experiment,
Each house a dinky crush of life. Loud talk
Siphoned through hanks of pipe and patched
Screen doors; plastic cups of RC Cola hung limp
As bridges made of toothpicks and sticky
Black gumdrops. Once I thought I heard a promise
Gurgled by the felt-mouthed swampcooler
Or maybe it was a neighbor, a warning wormed over
String between Styrofoam telephones. Maybe
It was my own wish to live coming to me from the future
As gossip. For the moment there was just the ice cream,
With its hollow straw, my gooey orange hands on a doorknob
Or shoelace, my own drowsing face.
And there was Elbert or the word for him, rather,
The letters fat and insistent and flexible as the boy must have been,
Crouching to name himself there.
