Timmy Straw

THE BORNEMOUTH CLIFFS OF AMERICA

I hear him in the next room,
     bumping in his auspices
like a moth in a lampshade,
     trying all afternoon to fix
the atomic clock with
     digits large enough
my mother can still read.

One day I’ll look at these things
     when my self means
less to me than my responsibility.
     I’ll see my parents’ room as it is,
a bustle skirt under which
     the shamed world hid
a consciousness.

The clock is beeping now,
     the action of it soldered in
overseas, its large gray
     buttons fixed
as to unsex and by degree
     advertised, as it was,
for seniors, in a magazine.

It was a gift. For my mother—
     her thoughts, pruned clean as cliffs,
shriek with murres,
     with scald and brine,
those economizing pleasures
     that close their moral
sea-shell clasp around a life.

Prizes come and go, the wisdom is,
     and steal the shore away.
I grew up there
     alongside those seaside games
that sing their end
     when you begin to play
and always a man there no one knows, 

old, off to the side—
     with rickets, selling egg creams
and candy cigarettes.
     My mother opens my mail.
She says my body’s hers.
     I can’t recall her love
turned as I am

to look the family in the throat.
     You can see anything in there.
A lozenge of mirror,
     our green sea-faces smoothed
and smoothed again
     as debt or thrall will have you look
and look at what will not
     look back.

TIMMY STRAW, a writer, musician, and translator from Oregon, is the author of The Thomas Salto (Fonograf Editions, 2023). Their poems appear in Annulet, Chicago Review, and The Paris Review. A Comp Lit PhD candidate at UPenn, they live in Philadelphia.