Two Poems

Half Sister

Since you’re going to Texas anyway, she says,
You should burn down my house.
Burn it down, and I’ll give you a thousand dollars.
I think about a brilliance of orange hallways,
televisions boiled to resin, a plume of great distance.
But how to do it? How do you be circumstantial,
how do you be innocent?
I think of watching from across the street as
Rob Hoffman put his heels into Ryan Cutts’ gut
for a few crumpled dollars when we were boys,
the Mexican boys who put me down like that
for my dollars that same year.
My half-sister and I didn’t grow up together;
there are many years between us, and
we never knew each other as kids.
Which is why, now that I’ve agreed to be
the trigger man in her insurance fraud,
we sit across from each other not knowing
which of us is joking, and which is truly capable.

Prose Poem to Jeffrey Dahmer

I was in third grade then; Mr. Atkinson read a chapter from The Whipping Boy at the end of each school day, and my father, who was around that year, was building a ’34 Ford coupe. He cut the chassis wider for a bigger engine, lowered the top of the fiberglass body three inches. I was working on a scale-model replica of the car, but couldn’t keep up with the modifications he made in his torch and mask. I wasn’t allowed to watch, and how the chassis widened, how the body lowered — these were mysteries to me, and my model was inauthentic before I could even finish it. In the evening, my parents and I would sit silently before the television, each of us eating off our own TV tray, and once the police broke into your apartment, you were a star. The only thing on was your face, your cross-eyed smirk and dirty moustache so much like his. We sat before you, and I heard the brand-new words homosexual, cannibal, predator, and skin used as a verb when human was both the agent and the object. Severed heads, torsos steeped in acid, eating biceps and bits of brain—it was all so exotic, and only forty minutes away. We were read a chapter of The Whipping Boy at the end of each school day, but no one ever asked or answered the question Why? What is it about this place — Mr. Atkinson, why is Wisconsin this way?

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Jon Boisvert is a poet living in Corvallis, OR.