Listen to the author reading this poem.
And the neighbor’s daughter shows my son
the way her father let her hold his gun,
with bullets in it. She was on Adderall,
and now Ritalin, and they’re only in
Kindergarten but my son doesn’t much
like her—the way she brags and lies
and tries to destroy the plants or bugs
around our house, which is the bus stop,
so we head out each morning in our
pajamas, clutching coffee mugs, to wait.
The engine of the bus is huffing,
unmistakable, and we can all hear it
before its yellow nose comes around
the bend. The kids climb the high steps
like they’re scaling a great peak.
I can see my son fling his body
into a seat; he waves from the window
while Sarah makes her way to her
mandated spot behind the driver,
who waves to us too, then pulls the lever
to shut the doors and heads down Heartwood
Crossing, though the sign says Xing
as the whole name won’t fit. This cross-
hatch, this target; X marks the spot
like those yellow and black novelty
signs: Moose Xing, Gator Xing,
Sasquatch Xing. my son loves to watch
the show Finding Bigfoot, where
a research team goes to Rhode Island,
Alaska, New York, to investigate
a recent spike in Squatch sightings.
Each episode is exactly the same,
save for the location: they go out
as a team one night to look for bigfoot,
call for him, and find signs. Next,
they have a town hall meeting
to discuss sightings with residents
who tell stories, which they recreate
using a giant guy named Bobo as a stand-in,
and they always come to the conclusion
that the resident did see a bigfoot—
that bigfoot could definitely live in
____________. We live in blank.
Sarah’s mother threw her father out
for keeping a loaded Uzi on the floor
of their garage. When Sarah aims,
with her fingers, at the empty birds’ nests
in the eaves of our porch, I wait for her
to say bang, but instead she repeats
it had bullets in it, and there’s the bus
wheezing around the bend again,
yellow as a road sign, a daffodil,
a stretch of CAUTION tape.
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