"Formative" by James Benger
In my very first bedroom,
the one I shared
with my eventual brother
up until the age of five,
that room in the trailer
out in the Indiana woods,
homemade septic tank
and holes in the living room floor,
my mother lined the walls with
construction paper letters,
colorful and jolly,
upper and lower cases,
print and script.
I might not have
learned to read in that room,
but I did learn of reading there,
how the letters
curve and bend,
break and snap back,
how they can scream cacophonic
or remain silent,
a secret between reader and page.
In that room,
cheap wood paneling and
electric train set on the
high shelf in the closet,
stuffed animals under the bed and
an animatronic bear that learned
to sing along to a Judas Priest tape,
I started to think of the alphabet
as a squared-off circle ––
A at the northwest,
Z at the northeast,
the hinterland between the two =
the part where you implore others:
“Next time won’t you sing with me?”
I thought of time in a similar way:
January = northeast,
December = northwest,
the upper gap
between = Christmas break.
In that room with those letters,
those months,
those concepts,
I ate hot dogs with ketchup on white bread
from the middle out,
and tuna fish from a bowl,
only once without the mayonnaise.
Those days in that trailer
out in the middle of
hunting season nowhere,
I formed and learned who I was.
I’m told the trailer burned down
over two decades ago,
the wooded land now houses
a shack that serves as a meth lab,
but none of that matters
because Thor,
my first dog,
who passed away in 1986 (or was it 7?)
is in a pine box in the hill I would sled on,
and the sound of
Mom and me
singing the alphabet
is still bouncing through the trees.