Janice Northerns

The blue, bent bicycle on the roof next door
stayed for a week
before someone yanked it down.
No neighborhood eyebrows raised,

just one more sign of property decline.
Their yard flutters with fast-food sacks
and dead toys; last week a tired ceramic cat
curled up cozy in ever-taller weeds.

Nothing too sacred for lawn ornament,
The five-year-old, locked out
for hours, clomps down the sidewalk
in dingy Scooby Doo briefs, scuffed cowboy boots

on the wrong feet. He makes a game
of darting behind my car every time
I back out. The girls, too young for Maybelline,
wear it anyway, swagger and brag

of tabloid boys slept with back in L. A.,
where they were rich, lived among the stars. Here,
the central air is broken and their windows,
open in the August swelter,

broadcast every slap. The kids
knock constantly, begging matches, a dollar,
a roll of scotch tape. My children call me cruel
when I lie, say we’re all out.

They don’t know how hard,
when that kid dares me in the driveway,
I have to bite my lip not to gun the motor,
run him down. How to explain it’s more than the doorbell

at two a. m.? All along the property line, I dream
of drenching the air with fire,
as if rusted hubcaps and bruises
could be warded off by quarantine.