"Early American Poverty" by Ed Brickell

Early American Poverty

Furnished in Early American Poverty,
my father-in-law said of his childhood home.
Leaving out a lot of details. Look down into
that model railroad town, where his father
sold window blinds door to door.

He honed himself into sullen anger
despite the boarding-house faith of his parents,
picture books of the pope on their coffee table.
Advice, he believed, a man of granite beliefs, is a debt
the old owe the young. His father gently droned on,
an impatience clutched his throat. Crossing a frozen river
to reliable mathematics, crossing back to the mystery
of his mother’s cancer. A fraternal order accepted him,
but women were the Ultimate Gate,
pulsing with inexplicable light.

He blind dated my mother-in-law, dominated her for fifty years.
“Dinner with Ted,” her diary said. “A most horrible evening.”
Marriage, a way to leave the farm. Her watercolors from
their European travels: careful copies of her fated destinations.
Sometimes he remembered her with short, dry barks,
experiments in how to miss someone.

One by one we all simply left,
barricading our homes as stoutly as possible.
His outraged confusion at our routine mistakes.
None of his brilliant patents could correct us.
Then his own mistake, a brain tumor the size of an orange.
The attendants at his bedside fled his shouted demands,
alone in a COVID lockdown. A nurse on a cell phone
described his last breaths. His engineering journal
still curled in my mailbox, indecipherable diagrams.
Recycling is easier than calling them to cancel.

Ed Brickell

A 2025 Best of the Net nominee for poetry, Ed Brickell lives in Dallas, Texas. His poems have most recently appeared in The Harvard Advocate, Delta Poetry Review, Susurrus, and others. He is currently working on his first chapbook, Wonderful Copenhagen.

Headshot: Janet Harris

Photo Credit: Staff