Boy Named Sue
by Ed Roundy
after Richard Siken
1
Each day you come home and fry two hash browns and one egg and if there is hope enough in the world then you blister tomatoes until they split. The seeds fly out from the heat and freckle blisters over the bones of your wrist. The egg never cooks right and the white of it is just slime. You eat it, because if someone finds the white in the trash they will know you have done wrong.
2
Faulkner said that the sun burned like a great egg in the sky and you have the same gray fever Addie Bundren did and you reach up to press the sun into the cool tile but you cannot help your hands from slipping. You are sorry you let it go. You are sorry you ever tried to take it. I think it’ll just happen again, he says, and your hands coil up because you never learned how to grow yourself better.
3
You’re trying to say sorry and it keeps slipping up your throat like egg white. It’s just like how Faulkner said, because the eyes across from you are Darl’s eyes as he sets the barn ablaze and you wish that the mouth below them would say something like My mother is a fish but it just curls into the shape you made, flank to cool tile in front of the fridge. No, it’s okay, really, he says but the words come out as slime.
4
You wonder if Faulkner hit his wife. He must have done. Or McCarthy or Cash or the dozen black-and-white men that shine in the dream that makes you ache. Because you could get so close if you liked. If you stopped with the tomatoes and had a cigarette with your egg and took your coffee black and stopped calling it brunch then you’ll know you’ll have done it right. You will beat your wife in black-and-white and your soul will part and slough away uncooked and this is how you know it will not have been for nothing. Because the stars are only ever white and the night is only ever black.
5
This is the part in the movie where you let down the little girls in the aisle seats because they were expecting you to be better. And you can’t say sorry because you can’t see the way they’ve dug back their heels and winced, because there you are thirty feet in the air, eyes burning like eggs. You can’t say sorry because you know that if you ever have a son, he’ll make you black-and-white. They watch you rub your face over the sink and grow scruffy and mean. Their chins perk up when he walks in because maybe now there is hope for you as he spits just what he means on the bones of your wrist.
6
You stand over the stove making a face like it’s beat you and there is the wood grain shape of a song and they’re singing about Jackson, again. You wonder if He–as black-and-white as anyone could get–ever beat his wife. And if he didn’t then all the talk about doing wrong was just talk, in the deep bass of a barn fire.