My mother let me play with Nelda
but her brother we all knew
was a bad one
who didn't know his place
so boozed and brawled
and couldn't keep a job.
He wasn't at all like his daddy,
who wore a brimmed hat
he tipped when we passed.
Every Friday,
my mother snapped shut the curtains
but we could hear him.
Nelda's brother
she told me wasn't mean
but hungry. Why didn't he eat,
I asked my daddy, who shrugged.
He giggled when he drank
and fell backwards from his chair.
At the Wichita zoo, we wrinkled our noses
against the monkey cage stench
and watched the little apes dangle sad
from fake trees, counted lions and leopards
laying heavy in caged shade,
somnolently opposed to their lives.
Nelda's brother
throbbed low like a stalled truck.
No noises like the animals
people in our house
named him. Buck, black
bull bastard, all one word.
He pounded the dirt of their yard,
the door Nelda's mom
shut against him
until he quit.
Hunched on their stoop,
face in his hands. A shame,
the people in my house said,
the way they live.
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