Three Suburban Sonnets

by Ray Nayler  |  Print Edition - Summer 2013
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Ray Nayler

The boy descends on plank and urethane,
on curb-scraped maple deck, on battered shins
from missed flip-tricks with now-forgotten names.
Just as the light cools out behind the cypress
trees, the TVs scumble glow across blue lawns
of Cherry Avenue, Orchard and Live Oak streets
(sodium-lit lanes denatured down to flat
routine). The hollow shield twists lithe beneath
his feet—battered guard against his high-school
enemies, sane raft awash the bone-lapped suburb
sea. Hard-asphalt breakers surf to a strip-mall
beach (now cracked glass panes, carcassed leaves and signs
FOR LEASE) where he heels tricks on parking blocks,
repurposes blacktop fields with winging feet.

We met every day to walk to school
from one California drought September
to a cool December still devoid of rain,
when the death of your drunk mother took you out
of the fragmentary sweep of memory:
the smell of wrestling mats, the tetherball
courts and tanbark splinters in our hands,
the little hell of playground and the taste
of sheared copper and cut grass in the mouth.
What can I recall of those months now?
The grossly drunken boyfriend on the couch
the apehangers, the cat-piss reek and then
you telling me “My mother’s dead” in gym.
I like to think somewhere you are a man.

Since none of us had parents in the way
it seems one used to, we were raised
by architecture and environment—
glass doors that gave out on gray backyards
and glistening snail tracks on cracked cement.
Colors like eggshell, khaki, taupe.
Shortcuts to strip malls through rows
of quick-growing trees. Everything
a fib—all “streets” just cul-de-sacs and courts.
Community centers void of communities,
but dumpsters full of fascinating things—
sloughed-off skins of interiority,
hints of hopes submerged and hidden sores.
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