Wild as a Kind of Alone

Wild as a Kind of Alone

My father liked to say he was a hobo. He said hobo. 

He smoked Marlboros at the picnic table on the driveway

and fantasized about eating beans right from the can.

My father, clinical psychologist, 

inventoried our belongings on 3x5 cards. Chest 

of drawers, buck saw, gray metal typing table: 

purchase price, depreciation. For the paint, a list 

taped to the basement cabinet doors:

Interior Primer Exterior Stain 

Half full Quarter full Nearly empty

As a family, we hand washed every window 

every fall. Every shirt became a rag.

When I broke with my husband, I knew 

I would be out there with the deer, 

scavenging berries on back lots 

with my rude teeth. 

So I made a budget that allowed for nothing: 

I’d cook dried beans soft, fold scrap paper 

envelopes, sew the menstrual pads. 

Questions: would the cotton be soft enough? If 

using velcro, could the bristles be kept from 

my tissue paper parts? Would the water required 

to rinse the shed-blood cost more 

than the cotton? Then I lived like this. 

Put herons in my chest. Spent hours with owls. 

I was ovenbird, hagfish, howler monkey. And it’s 

been years since I was hungry. But I still squeeze 

my sriracha bottles clean. A coyote quiet with itself.
 

A therapist said to me, Be extravagant. 

Every time I type that word I can’t believe

how many As it has. It’s unapologetically resplendent. 

I’m in a mansion shell in the woods. Every night 

after bathing, I put on the long pink nightgown 

from Goodwill. The skirt so mooned, 

I have to hold it in my arms 

just to climb the stairs, which I do, 

pretending an urn of honey steadies 

on my head, while my hips swing right 

left, right left. All the way up.