Outside Giant,                        
            a woman, whose child—                   
one of three, all under ten,                                         
and this one maybe five,                                            
            a girl—is going wild,                                     
crying (keening really),                                              
up the canned-goods aisle,                                         
            past the Wonder,                                                        
                        crazed, noncompliant,                        
            face borscht red,                                
 
                        now breaks down
            herself—the mom, I mean—
grabbing the kid by the coat.
She pulls her close and screams
            something PG-13                                           
in the half-full parking lot,                                        
not caring that we’ve seen                 
            her lose her shit.                                             
                        Two cars down,                                 
            a guy, foot-lit                                     
           
                        by tail lights,
            starts tsking as he pops his trunk,
saying good and loud, for me to hear,
“That’s no way to treat your kid.”
            He wobbles like he’s drunk                           
or has bad hips, slides                                    
into his piece of junk                                                 
            and turns it over.                                            
                        His brights
            illuminate the river
 
                        of rain
            bubbling like sea spray
across the pocked anchorage
in which our cars are moored.
            On my way                                                    
home, it’s still needling me:               
What’s that guy’s deal? Okay,                                  
            he has no children. But who’s                                   
                        more insane?
            He’s sure it’s her; I choose
 
                        him. And me?
            Tonight my son
actually flinches as he turns
the corner, still stinging from my swat,
            with his Nerf gun
cocked. He paints the enemy,
remembering him red-faced, gone
            ballistic, flashing teeth.
                        Down his sights, he
            squints and aims at me.
 
                        And I agree:
            they will be in his mind
forever, the image of me raging
and the look on his mother’s face.
            Will he, in his turn, find
a different way to be? So far,
he is, in his finer moments, kind.
            Other times he’ll turn
                        raw, like me, and like me
            will not learn.


David Yezzi is the keynote reader of this year’s West Chester University Poetry Conference. He will be reading in Sykes Auditorium in West Chester on Wednesday, June 5, 2019 at 8 pm. The reading is free and open to the public. Yezzi’s latest books of poetry are Birds of the Air and Black Sea. His verse play Schnauzer was recently published by Exot Books. A former director of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y in New York, he is chair of the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and editor of the The Hopkins Review. He is currently at work on the biography of Anthony Hecht.