Skowhegan, Maine
Black coffee, frog call, duck itch, Skowhegan, Maine, summertime.
It’s breakfast and I eat veggie sausages and dry scrambled eggs. I have to go back — and then once more — because my tin cup is too small and I’m getting addicted to coffee for the first time. I’m careful that the dining hall’s screen door doesn’t swing back and clip my heels. In there, I see the memory of my mom and dad, a little chubbier, my age, meeting for the first time. My mom didn’t notice my dad until her friend, Amy, pointed him out: “Byron is kind of cute, right?” From then on she paid a little more mind to the dorky Korean guy who always brought Tabasco sauce to the dining hall in his shirt pocket. This memory is not mine.
Sunshade, cleaning fluid, face mask, hot water, yellow rubber gloves.
I sweep, wash, and wait for the fresco-barn floor to dry. All around are paintings like walls. Wet layers of plaster, chalky, textured like sediment to become stone. Their colors are young, like me. I wonder which of us will last longer.
Vending machine hum, the chorus of Steely Dan’s “Do it Again,” ham sandwich on multigrain, muddy, buggy pine.
After work, I walk on the wide road to the lake. The tan from my swim suit makes me look like a sun bear, with one big, brown circle on my back and my goggles gave me pale ovals around my eyes. I dip my toe and a person waves to me far away on the floating dock. I am bashful. I am thirteen. I am trying to keep to myself.
Sticky picnic tables, daisy chain of horny dragonflies, Gifford’s “Moose Tracks” ice cream, stomach ache.
It seems like it is always raining on the last day. I remember rain getting the last word even during the driest summers. Driving away — going south through the Pioneer Valley, then through Connecticut, and into the August fog of the city — I feel like a kid of three diasporas.
I tried to grow out of this place. My mom doesn’t like that I got it tattooed on my back. She hates my tattoos and calls them doodles. The light-polluted New York sky is a deep purple that bleeds yellow ochre at the horizon and laughs at me. I remember seeing country stars for the first time in Maine and wanting to press my palms on the celestial dome. That itch still hurts to scratch.
