Felt Flowers

The play room’s alphabet pattern padding could be pulled apart, then

repositioned; after snack, the older, all-day boys—who tore off,

one by one, the turtles’ shells, a hippo’s quiet heft, and fed

the bashful ones their heads—huddled around their stockpile of

letters and laid out a dirty word that made the other kids

giggle or gasp and Miss Margaret tap the backs of their hands with

the yellow wooden yardstick. I couldn’t read yet.

I wouldn’t talk, either;

                              my language was the felt

flowers in the clear plastic tub, at the back table by the window, which

looked out at the slide, glistening like a tongue in

the brash noon light. An older boy stole

my poppy, so I assembled a pansy, pre-cut

by Miss Margaret at her house after school. I imagined her

pouring over a private abundance 

of patterned scissors for the jaggedness of a lily’s leaf, then the sturdy

kitchen shears for a pile of rose petals. Years later, she’d return beneath

the tangled top sheet of dreams, and before I could smooth

the intrusion in me, a muscle-drenched arm—veins like a textbook’s

anatomical orchid, dense hair

like my father had—guided her two fingers farther

into the scissor’s doubled gape—

                                                  Blistering then in the fully-bloomed heat,

the swings seemed to rock, but within themselves, the way

a lightbulb, untouched for years, holds a spasm

in its tungsten, a self-possessed momentum, awaiting fingers

on the switch. A group of girls, that day, trudged over, 

at Miss Margaret’s insistence, barrettes wincing above their ears, 

the button I’d cut from my best Sunday dress a makeshift bud 

atop a glue glob smear. They asked me if I wanted

to play house. I set my pink felt down.

                                              I didn’t know I could be the father, so

I said I’d be the dog. They named me Princess. One girl put on

an apron, white plastic pearls. Two others, fabric dolls in hand,

the daughters. One adhered

                                    a costume mustache and a voice

absurdly low. We arranged the mats by color for the rooms in our

make-believe home. I played my part; I laid in the yard, 

on the green pieces, the letters, an F, an A. My job, I’d decided, was not

to bound into the room, pretend-panting at my family’s feet,

with the whimper

                         dogs give when they want to be loved, but—

watching Miss Margaret tend to the bullies, our tiny table set, 

the family complete, curled up in

my own constant obstinate heat—to guard my made-up post,

on the bladeless lawn, alone, even if anyone called my name.