—another way of saying how when people fall in love, they burn shit to the ground or shove whatever else they find inside one another over a cliff into deep water, because no one ever created anything good without destroying something better first, darling, it’s where all the best parts come from: I bought you a hammer, I unbuttoned my shirt, I lay back on our kitchen table and said, Aim anywhere, just don’t miss, the kind of act that Jesus Christ is supposed to love enough to live onloop. Lie still, and I promise this won’t hurt, that I won’t hurt you very much, says the iron mallet to the nail quivering, then driven hard through a throbbing palm: you lifting the hammer, how you heaved, brought its steel claw down through the wood next to my neck, and how your chest shuddered just after: if I wanted to crush your heart, I would tie a cardinal to a crystal tumbler and hurl it into a brick wall.

My Father In the Other Room Tells His Brother’s Ex-Lover How to Love a Man

—something, maybe, he can’t hear himself saying with the same mouth
that once prayed for sons, mouth that told me this is love when he would carry

my mother home from parties and set her down to sleep on her side, big mouth
that once famously told a lawyer on court record I don’t think you’d suck a dick,

but I’d bet you’d hold one in your mouth until the swelling went down—lines he learned,
maybe, from his grandfather dropping a mule to the ground with a single uppercut

or his father removing his cotton shirt in the California sun to wipe his face and tie
a tourniquet for a gash above his wrist before re-greasing his chainsaw and going right

back to felling trees on their property above Lake Shasta, a part, maybe, my father learned
from relocating his own shoulder time and again when rowing crew or boxing popped it

out of its socket—a body he probably learned long before all of this the day he watched
his brother, sick with sun, set his face against the cool black wood of their mother’s piano

and cry and cry over a few fingers broken against the brick their father had tossed to him
in the yard, saying any son of a bitch should be able to catch a baseball, but any son of mine

should be able to catch a brick, scars my father still points to in the palm he now presses
to his jaw as he says to a man he’s only met once and briefly, graveside for the man

whose leaving they share, “I love you I love you I will never not love you” and nothing else
is all I ever wanted my father to say to me, and he only said it once because that’s a man’s way,

you should never have to tell anyone anything twice, my father’s way of asking this man
who does a man have left to keep if his brother is gone, his way of wanting to know what

will men who loved the same man do for one another when that man who broke them both
goes missing for years and finally shoots himself in the bathtub of a hotel? His face reflected

in the front window and again in the hallway mirror, my father cradles his phone in
his shoulder and his mouth in his hand, his other hand balled up, a hammer he brings

down and down, down without a sound on the leather arm of his chair, his eyes,
the same vacant shade of milk glass they turned when I asked him as a child why

I don’t have an uncle if he has a brother and was told in return, if he’s not dead
by now, he probably will be soon, and I don’t want to be around to have to bury him.

M.K. Foster’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The Columbia Review, Crazyhorse, The Offing, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. She currently teaches and pursues a PhD in Renaissance Literature at the University of Alabama. For additional notes, please visit marykatherinefoster.com.