George Guida
my mother
will take him for the evening,
greet us house-coat old at midnight
in our elegant dinner clothes,
to exclaim, "What's wrong with you?
You're raising an idiot."
After a day
of fishing,
my father will lead him back to us,
kiss my wife hello, and say,
"Sweetheart, he's adorable, your spitting image,
but when it comes to thinking,
he's Dickie the Dunce."
Aboard my
father’s skiff,
he will have put a sandworm up his nose,
stuck a fish hook through his lip,
and stared for three hours
at the same spot in the water.
Beside my
mother on the couch,
my son will eat the stuffing from his toy dog.
At dinner he will bang his head on the table,
rub orange juice in his eyes,
and spit in his own soup.
When I read
him a good night story,
he will repeat the main character's name
for twenty minutes, ignoring his adventures,
until my boy becomes a part of the fiction
that somehow he surpasses other people's children
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