Who Knows Who

Alicia’s dad made one more crack...“big bones,”
as she poured a second bowl of lucky charms
and pictured home invaders tying him up,
offering her more wine if she’ll help the guys
find the fastest way out of town—no freeways.
Her father took her weight as one more sign
of his defeat, the next thing that had to happen,
daughter too smart and too fat to go anywhere,
same way his own father once looked at him back
in Queens, college fag, real work not good enough.
Rhonda brushed the grass off her jeans, threw them
in the wash, smiling at the thought, fucking in the park,
her husband, Clark, still not settled on sex in bed,
as if humans were monkeys, and fantasies rolled
down our highways big as Cadillacs—2.5 tons.
God, Clark, get real, she’ll some day say, afraid
that will be the firing gun for Clark to go away,
her desire to be nude in a room of men unsaid.
He just wants to go flat track racing before kids.
Frank pops a Bud, giving up so fast, he’s passed
the speed with which this planet turns, as if death
could be reeled in quick as a fish, landed bright
as a bonita out of the Pacific, bouncing until still.
It sends Gloria out to the garden talking to flowers,
confusing them with the kind of people who bloom,
people she believed lived one town over or on TV.