My love life is a window shutter made entirely out of broken glass
and I wish everything came in yellow, I tell my father
as he drives us home in the middle of the night
with a beer in his hand, coming back from Grandma’s
house where she held court with the relatives about
how she believes it would be wise if I came and spent some
time with them for the next decade and do some work
around their house. My upstairs is always open, I can hear
her intoning from the kitchen island she had redone
last fall during her bout with breast cancer, cleaning
her teeth with a pink toothpick because she’s
a good daughter and an even better Florida lady
checking off all the things great grandaddy Greene
taught her to be just like my mother is teaching me:

not my real mother, she’s dead like mosquitoes in the winter,
which I realize implies a second coming, but the summer
came with all it’s yellow and we found Chistine: my new mother
who is not my real mother but something better:
my second mother like baby Jesus asleep in a manger
managing an eternity of well wishes through endless days
of working like a fast food toaster and sweating down the nile:
Be a poet, she says, Be the weatherman. Be the reason
everyone brings a coat to work. You always know what to say.
My mouth is attached to the part of my brain
that wears a suit and tie to his job and halfway through the day
eats a Rueben downtown at his favorite delicatessen
and shuffles through so many papers and has to remember
eighteen different things and always says what he’s

trying to say. Mouth of the South is what they used to call me
along with white lightning, even though nobody called me
either of those things, but they did call me Peter Parker, not so much
in likeness to Spider-man because I am not famous for
climbing up walls or kissing in the rain but because by day
I’m a nerd and by night I’m also a nerd, only wearing tight leather pants,
not red ones, but yellow, like a box of cheerios, heart healthy,
the whole world shaded ripe banana, Burt’s Bee chapstick,
and Clorox wipe bottle yellow because I don’t need a reason
to want to like watching TV shows where a man paints
a mountain snowstorm midnight sienna or tell that girl
down the road that I think I’m in love with her.
Like I told you, broken glass. My hands always hurt. There’s nothing
left for me to do but glue it together. Dad, don’t worry, I’ll be back.

Parker Logan is a current student at FSU and his work is forthcoming in the Allegheny Review and Pretty Owl Poetry.