Terrified by the sight of my own blood

First Visit To My Grandparents

I walk the graves to find my own

Dripping genetic sweat on clippings of grass

Searching for their names, my name

In Pennsylvania. From Austria-Hungary

Past suicide row, the lawn mower calls it, by the scrappy trees

Where he doesn’t go. Finally, I kneel under the pines

Kissing tribute to their granite lives, smooth and burning

In the Slovak town by Hermitage, in Sharon

Where pig blood drained to the Shenango River

Where Dad’s pitch-forked fish bled in the Shenango

Deer grazing under the spent orchard above the Shenango

Cicadas screaming as the highway spoons the Shenango                                    

Numb stone walls, Sharpsville Steel, bricks

Muscarella’s Restaurant, beer and tattooed boys

Lawns of used furniture and tackle shop under the flag

Everyone grown old on the slag heaps by the Shenango

Patagonia, where the Slovaks arrived to steel mills and railroad Co.s

Patagonia, where warped boards are scraped of paint by years  

Patagonia, where unemployed weeds dawdle on the baseball field

Patagonia, where possessions of paycheck days are sold on lawns

With tongues of moss spewing fuck the future

Channeling fathers’ chapped knuckles across lips

Where slate turns to cardboard on sodden sheds

Walking the asphalt with get-by thoughts

I have come as an explorer

But leave having been ripped

From the old world, terrified

By the sight of my own blood