On his hands and knees,
my father confronted
the bane of his existence
each weekend
with the switchblade
he confiscated while
teaching junior high
in the desert; evidence
not of a crime but of
his own acuity for noticing
concealed weapons, as if he had
to be reminded—he was
denied tenure at that job—
while emancipating
the lawn from its demons.
The blade slipped
beneath the roots,
catapulted nub
and infrastructure like
so much fish, the kind
my mother said she lived with
in Japan; a country
that smelled of them,
islands of death,
though my father’s domain
teemed with ladybugs, snails,
gophers, other intruders
my sister and I encouraged.
Though he cut around
the weeds, their exorcism
left triangle-shaped scars
in the dirt, the type you get
picking pimples off your skin;
how he went wild
with judgment whenever
our mother sat before
a mirror, mining her face
to reveal scabs and scoring
on her visage. I might
have studied triangles
in school—Sin, Cosine, Tangent--
though I dropped the class
because it made no sense:
trajectory, angle, expanse
somehow more efficient
than lines, circles, or arithmetic.
When my daughter explained
the real-world applications
of all this, I felt like
I got it. In real time, however,
my father was livid,
how would I ever amount
to anything without a solid
background in these metrics.
Jane Rosenberg LaForge writes poetry, fiction, and occasional essays from her home in New York. She is the author of a memoir, two novels, three full-length poetry collections, and four chapbooks. You can find her on Twitter @JaneRLaForge, or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100063717211528