Embryo

…Lundin didn't want a haircut. According to court testimony, he grabbed his mother's shirt collar and pulled on it until he felt her body go limp.

—The Virginian-Pilot, 1995

Fresh from Floridian intrigue, sane

Maggie Valley suited the rigid Danes

in their squat chalet by Twinbrook.

Peter introduced his goblin mother.

She ushered us up steep stairs with a fly

swatter and called me fat shit, greedy eater.

Pete’s bronzed tales were rarer than mine,

his room papered with cool wave riders,

so I was flip. We were boy changelings

who fought and spit. A wider world

would need to pay for the sting. We pled

with Donny Raddle to stop strangling us.

Buff fiend of our crew, he taught us ways

to wound by emotional onslaught:

his wolfen voice made us tremble in bunkbeds.

Frenzied in a basement dungeon,

we roused thrash-metal lightning on cassette.

Hot boxing Chesterfields, we stifled breath,

blacked out in sin and wagering with death.

Our model for anger was Lou Ferrigno,

so we studied how to cope; but teen dreams

soon underwhelmed us. Atrocity began

and Pete fled the county in a wraith’s cape,

­­toward press photos. Scalloped by a dune ­­­­

near the lighthouse, his mother had arisen

in indigo-blanket scraps, her black plastic

burial snarled with tape and yellow rope.