Road Bumps

Let's workshop this poem, an unflinching look at Istvan family dysfunction, that highlights the cyclical nature of abuse and the lasting effects it can have on both the abuser and the abused

Road Bumps 

1

According to some (if only one), Jack has made it a point
to smash his junkyard salvage into every bump in the road. 
His intention, so cries from the passenger seat his wife
of rigid corpulence, is to blacken her thighs, kill her spine. 

Barb has taken loads from Jack over these forty-five years: 
arguing, alcohol, abuse, affairs. Off booze for decades now,
though, these days the man is too frail to beat and cheat. 
False ribs have busted just sitting on the living room floor.

Jack barely has breath to sit there, let alone do what Barb
feels he would if able: creep up the creaking steps like old,
now with his O2 tank, to pin down a granddaughter. Still,
on her account, he has ways to torture in his golden age:

making the house delirious with fumes of turpentine
and oil paint; detaching upper dentures with his tongue 
and, smile wide, letting them dangle over the lowers,
his face a menacing jack-o'-lantern for terrified grandkids;

whiskering even infant faces; hand-cupping fiery farts
to raise them to unexpecting noses; gripping thresholds
to rooms with filthy fingers to instigate a Barb tirade; 
smooching grandkids with his cold sores still weeping;

having the grandkids tear off fungal toenails, their pay 
brass arcade tokens obsolete from yard sales; insisting
“Blue!” as he holds up the red crayon to wide-eyed kids;
and, most recently, smashing into road bumps for his wife.  

Futile as it feels to her, she cannot stop telling grandkids,
her only source of recognition, of what Grandpa is up to. 
Pink sponge curlers throughout her black Italian hair, Barb 
sits furiotic at her spot next to the roach-spawning fridge.

Its asthmatic hum has her feel impotent in yell, sweat
beading under her widow’s peak. From beneath its door,
duct-taped shut, bleeds what seems raw chicken juice
over tiles linoleum, curling, cracked, often free-floating.

To support her daily attrition, she makes character attacks 
such as “Grandpa would go around with diseased whores!” 
or her go-to charge: “Finger-banging the Conklin sisters
in my own cellar! Beacon trash. Sold my dolls for slut money!”

Jack would be in range, crumpled by his O2 tank watching
Sanford and Son on the floor-runner of the living room—
his spot. “And when that wasn’t enough,” she might add,
eyes going from the ceiling rot to the child across the table.

“I’ll say it! When that wasn’t enough, the fuck comes home 
to touch your mother.” Eyes up again. “Drunk in her bed!”
The cleft of her moose-knuckle deepened by her advance,
a sudden rage shift, to the seat’s edge, “What’s the matter? 

Weren’t satisfied, Jaaack!? Had to touch the kids? Boys too!?” 
Nose-smarting necrosis ruffled from another shift in her pants
(always polyester stretch), before another babysat grandkid 
she might go, “And then what does the whoremaster do?”

To the sagging ceiling: “I’ll say it, pig!” To the kid: “Yeah!
Busts my teeth, saying I’m having sex—with daddy.” Eyes up:
“Filthy fingers in my vagina! Only a sicko would think that.
Never screwed my kids. Not like your whore mother, Jaaack!”

He would take it all on the plastic runner, leaning on the sofa
(Barb’s couch): continental blue like Werner freight trucks.
Reckless with his Camel ashes, Jack was never allowed to be 
on that relic of good times not once freed of its plastic cover.

“Jack. Ha! Jack the painter! Can’t even make a living, the bum!
Dirt, toenail fungus, paint—all over my linens, my good dolls. 
Istvan Beacon trash! Fills me with kids, the fuck! Trapped here
forty damn years in the mountain, this Howland hell-hole!”

Worn perhaps stoic by the yelling, Jack rarely speaks back. 
“The whacko laughs, laughs as his own kids twitch from lead—
lead paint!” On occasion he mimics her name-extension shriek,
but never above an indoor decibel: “Keep talking, Baaaaarb.” 

Older grandchildren like to rev Grandma up, instigation
a coping tactic bound to become a personality trait. Mouths
of cold bologna on Wonder, they might yell to the ceiling 
(regarding the whoring claims): “Grandpa’s a ladies’ man!” 

They yell for her, to rile her perhaps to the heart attack
she says always looms because of the stress. They yell, alive
now, so he will do his smirk under the blown-speaker crackle
of the TV, whose metal peg dial must be turned with pliers.

“Ladies’ man? Yeah, real ladies’ man. Try abusive drunk pig. 
Almost killed his newborn son. ‘This ain’t my kid,” he says. 
Then he punches your dad, a baby, right in the damn head! 
The priest’s reading the last rites and where’s he? Fishin’!”

Younger ones like Johnny, confused and bobbing-weaving 
from crotch plumes (and yet to have their instigator furnaces
ignited), focus on the action figures they have maneuvering
amid the table clutter of dentures, cheese puffs, and so on: 

scaling the GI Joes up the fort wall provided by the box
of Hungry Jack or by stacked cans of condensed milk; 
hiding the ninja turtles in the bush provided by the hair
of the porcelain dolls that Barb collects from yard sales.

2

Ten-year-old Johnny, sits in the back atop piles of trash
and house-painter gear. Head low, his depression hunch
already irreversible without surgery, he rides with them
to yard sales before poor-kid karate. He can do her well.   

Often trying to draw Grandpa’s notice in the rearview,
Johnny makes her angry face and mouths her words 
as she screams, “I watched you go into it, Jaaaaaack!
See! I told you, Johnny! See what Grandpa does to me?” 

Johnny puts his face regular and slights his head 
to the window when her cheese puffs bag, locked 
at breast by the sash strap of her seatbelt, crunches 
with her strain to twist into his eyes for emphasis. 

“Grandpa’s trying to kill me! Giving me blood clots, 
the fuck!” Because Grandpa never responds back, 
Johnny thinks that he is the victim. He thinks this 
despite all the knocks shifting clutter onto him.

He thinks this despite seeing Grandpa in the mirror 
smirking beneath his O2 nose tubes. He thinks this 
despite wondering if the ghost that his mom insists
would pin her down in bed was really just Grandpa. 

Johnny has started to pray for Grandpa to hit bumps—
as many, as fast, as possible. Johnny hates her nagging. 
He hates having to play the numbers for her. He hates 
being the lookout for her baths in the combustible creek.

Dog walkers come by anyway as he kicks rocks—shocked 
to find a boy on shore in a gi holding a towel (“Hey there, 
son”), then perturbed by that background mass lathering 
in the superfund effluvia of capitalism (“C’mon, Spike”).

3

After karate one night, Johnny, face hidden by the brim
of his menthol green Newport hat, approached the Datsun, 
unmistakable for its flat finish of red housepaint applied
by Jack with a paintbrush after he got it from the dump.

Johnny was embarrassed about having gotten paint 
on the dojo while stretching. Johnny knew that even if 
no one had seen the like blue on his ass, the afroed sensei 
often noted how he always smelled of paint thinner.

Grandma, just then, addressed him in a tone reserved
for the outside world alone. “What’s the matter, Johnny?”
Jarred by such a tone coming from her, Johnny looked up
to see them in smoke. “Grandpa, the car’s smoking!” 

Feeling slick in his yard-sale purchases (dentures,
a mesh trucker hat that said “I’m no brick mason
but I’ll lay anything,” and prescription bifocals), 
Grandpa seemed unfazed by the announcement.

Hand compression-braced to squish down tumors, 
he took his time pissing into Barb’s Tab Cola can,
his mouth opening and closing with a quick pulse, 
his breathing like that of a wolf eel out of water. 

The car failed to backfire up as usual, Grandma moist
under her widow’s peak, as Jack tried to turn the key.
Grandpa was the one who painted the service station
adjoining the dojo. Its head mechanic walked over.

“Pop it and everyone out,” said the red-bearded man. 
Under the hood he tinkered and the smoke stopped.
They got out. He got in and drove one of many streets 
crumbling throughout the city of Beacon, New York. 

Black smoke pulsed from the exhaust pipe in stutters
broken. The Hoveround mounted to the bumper sparked
the road at points and the towel window backseat bulged 
from airflow. And Johnny saw his kind for the first time.
 
The mechanic stepped out and patted himself off
and Johnny wondered how the ass of his jumpsuit 
must have smelled after sitting in Grandpa’s seat:
green with geographic stains, fungal stuffing abloom. 

Grandpa, in the same flannel, had not bathed in years—
clear by his all-season duskiness and that turkey finger
of scrotal flesh cured and smoked by farts. Worse
it would have been, Johnny thought, passenger side.

Grandma’s fabric seat was printed by fetid crotch
forever festering in those polyester stretch pants 
that brought on disorders of the brain for each 
nosed creature within three feet of a hip bounce. 

Wiping hands by habit on his grease rag, the mechanic
stood there a moment eying Jack: the sickled smirk, 
the face palsied from Lyme or a stroke, a feature recent
on the still-duck-tailed painter he knew so long.

With a tone that seemed to say, “You really need 
to take better care of yourself,” the mechanic said, 
“She’ll run, Jack.” “Thanks Rick,” Grandpa said, 
giving up his fight to pull from the yard-sale inhaler.

It was strange hearing him talk for once. Stranger it was 
hearing him go off. “All of us still want to be decent. 
We rage. We want what others have. We go around
so afraid. We all still want to be decent.—Pathetic.” 

This poem is unpublished