THESE BOYS
BY DAWN TEFFT
There are boys rioting in the curtains of the house my mind built. These boys are all fists. No matter how many mothers, they can't hear their names through the confusion. These boys. They sleep underneath the furniture and inside the screaming kettle. I can tell they're boys because they send out signals that bounce back like emails. No message, just echolocation saying they exist. Sometimes they write in the morning while I'm still asleep. My friends show me the critics' glowing reviews: pornographic military humor in the style of Confucius. I want to smear their voices with neon and watch their words arc across an unlit room. Like when they hit fireflies with bats across the night sky. Sometimes they remind me of my brothers, but my brothers are just ghosts of thumbprints in cakes. My brothers are usually in jail. These boys are everywhere, rusting on the insides of TVs. Every boy a show about chewed through wires soaking inside a shot glass. I want to coax them out of their resemblance to each other. I can't find the knob to turn off knuckles swinging at the moth's fluttering. These boys.They get their hands stuck in jam jars and look sadly out the window, waving a jar for help.
DAWN TEFFT's poems are published or forthcoming in Fence, Witness, and Court Green, among other journals. Her chapbook Fist is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press, and her chapbook Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations was published online by Mudlark. She holds a PhD in Creative Writing from University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and works as a higher ed union organizer.