While Cleaning My Room To Leave For Philly Poem by Jacob Bearer

I sifted through lingering memories
living like Lazarus wrapped in doodled notes in folders,
stiff in my desk drawer - slowly coming to light.

Pictures of a thinner, blonder self
pulling up my mudded T-shirt with a painted smile
that showed a black & blue new Tipman tattoo.

My niece is back in my arms
smelling of baby powder with closed eyes to the new light -
the frame couldn't fit a mother's glistening cheeks
above her metal framed bed.

Then my Bellagio dice hit the pine floor at gym -
behind the bleachers -
while my buddy raked in 8th grade crisp Washingtons
that we used to buy some cowboy killers -
well...Rick's older brother, whose shadow grew over Coco Puffs,
would throw the cigs our way.

On the backside of a Madonna with Child:
Theodore T. Cogan 1922-2000;
and I put my twin size covers over my head that night
and tried to convince myself that this wasn't death -
with my face outlined in my speechless father's flannel chest -
himself having gone through many deaths.

And an olive wood rosary from Jerusalem,
that slid between your fingers like soft hair,
made a fine necklace, a fine meditation,
a fine reason to find myself back looped to the crucifix,
holding my thumb over the corpus like a shroud.

All these slides are of a story - that is, one Story -
that Sr. Brendon could drone a decade of Ave's over -
leading me 'round an olive lined hill
outside my City of memories
to a crest my past hasn't caught up to yet.