Homecoming
Our home was a seventies tourist town.
They were painting signs and breaking ground
on a water park and a new motel.
Built a dam upstream and the forests fell.
Inland were the poor and the dairy farms,
with their hearts of gold and their suntanned arms.
Walked to school uphill both ways.
Sunday mornings, they sang God’s praise.
The millennium came and the Gen Xers left.
The vacationers went further south for their rest.
The price of milk dipped and the stock market crashed.
The locals grumbled that nothing good lasts.
Teachers called me special; classmates called me a “chink.”
My Dad shook his head as he poured his third drink.
I was scared of you then. I hit back and hit hard.
At eighteen I left. I ran fast and ran far.
I’m home for the summer. I’m standing in line
in the grocery store when your eyes meet mine.
Timerman / Poetry / 2
I ask, “How’ve you been?” You say you’re doing fine.
You’ll live here forever. Are you tired of life?
I dreamt that one day I would visit our town.
I wouldn’t stay long but I’d see you around.
Now I’m grown I know how things turned out for us both.
This home makes me feel lonely but we never were close.
The Tune of Broken Things
A shuttered church stands by a tired town market.
We used to worship there when I was young.
The ghosts of saints march by the stained glass windows,
whistling the hymns of praises never sung.
The church was clearing out its attic memories:
The treasures and the joys of former lives.
I mourned the stories sold on folding tables
when something in the corner caught my eye.
A bluebird made of glass was singing to me.
Etched in it was the name of old lives passed.
It held the blue of sunlight glowing faithful.
A blue like that’s the light of love that lasts.
I danced my bluebird round the kitchen island.
I must have heard it shatter on the ground.
I don’t recall the shards hitting the tiles,
but guilt clings to the heart longer than sound.
The bluebird on my bookshelf for safe keeping;
I meant to glue the wing back where it sheared.
The light is dull where careless clipped his freedom.
A mournful tune he sings for twenty years.
Picture Frame
So this is what it is like
to be held
and still feel empty.
This is what it is like
to feel wanted
but still unloved.
This is what it is like to realize that everything you imagined
was better than it was.
I live too much in endings;
replaying how they happened
and how I cried
every time.
But this morning,
I cannot help
but think of beginnings,
and beginnings without me,
and how peaceful that would be.
I saw you today
for the first time
in a long time
and all I felt was
revulsion.
All the nights I spent wanting you,
all the years I gave loving you,
Timerman / Poetry / 7
I can’t recall that old familiar
compulsion.
And I am shocked by how the ground has
shifted.
Now I see the cracks in the picture frame.
And I am saddened,
deeply saddened,
that I’m the only one whose world has changed.
Silk House
He grew up in a house
with a ramshackle frame
where the snow days felt like a life sentence.
In a church in a hamlet
where they still praised God’s name,
he studied the rules of repentance.
He made friends with the spider
in the corner of his room.
He dreamed of a mansion of silk.
They could not pay the bills,
or the rent coming soon,
or the price of a gallon of milk.
He lives on in your head
when you’re lonely and blue
and you think how much worse it could be.
He’ll be here tomorrow
When your day starts anew.
You’ll have forgotten him easily.
Madeline Timerman is a senior studying English and business administration at Binghamton University. She hails from the Thousand Islands, New York, and plans to pursue a graduate degree in English and creative writing. Madeline’s research interests include the postcolonial Bildungsroman and Asian American women in literature and film.