The Boy Scout Handbook

Father makes a big loop
then pulls the end of the rope through.
It looks like a cursive O,
the first letter of a word
in a foreign language
we’re trying to master
but neither of us has a clue:
bowline, clove hitch, sheet bend.
He looks at the book
then pulls the rope out,
sweating—his big hands
that would sooner carve sides of beef.
Years earlier he took me
to his meat market
and showed off the carcasses
hanging in the locker.
See, this is how you carve a steak,
from the hindquarter.
His cleaver glided easily
across lines of gristle
then he handed me the filet,
blood dripping
from his hands into mine.

This poem appeared in FutureCycle, December, 2009, and in FutureCycle Poetry: Poems for the Ages, Future Cycle Press, 2010

Summer Camp 

We line up to play bombardment
and everyone wants to be on 
Bobby Thewman’s team.
We know the rage in his eyes
as he pulls back his right arm,
the white ball suddenly not a white ball.
We’ve all had it hurled into our stomachs,
the greasy breakfast eggs an unwanted return.
We go back to the same camp in the Catskills
every year, children of survivors
from the same German-Jewish ‘hood—
so we can name the perpetrators,
hear them screaming in a language
we speak to our families, identify
our grandparents in photos and letters.
 
We’re stunned when Bobby Thewman
doesn’t return one June.
He moved in with relatives across the country,
his parents having made a pact:
his father firing the first of two shots.

This poem appeared in FutureCycle, December, 2009, and in FutureCycle Poetry: Poems for the Ages, Future Cycle Press, 2010

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© Copyright,  2011, Stewart Florsheim,
All rights reserved.