Bobby Parrott

Toy Drum, Misplaced

Younger than ever,
the frowning girl studies
the math of my shadow

until the bunched lines
of her December brow slide
back, bronzed. Selecting a genuine
replica, she focuses on a single
equation, one less Euclidean
if only for background
boys, and their strange pull

on the brittle arm
of her memory. Her toy drum
misplaced, she points
a finger at the melted whistle
of my voice box. I try to speak,

can only honk my cardboard
birthday party-horn. Now
she aches for magenta, tells me
so. Her prim-pleated sundress fades—
lemony bloom into fluffy pear,
cemetery chrysanthemum. Decades

stir the tender wreckage. The glass
of water in my hand trembles,
concentric ripples circling
the string of bees
she pulls through my eye.
I circle for the center. It’s all
I can do. Her little hand
pauses. Her head tilts open.
I can no longer find her.

I wish I were less solid,
penciled in
like the open curves
of her neck—my head clear,
gift-like, complete.

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Bobby Parrott was probably placed on this planet in error. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, this poet's universe frequently reverses polarity, slipping his meta-cortex into the unknowable dimensions between breakfast and adulthood. In his own words, "The intentions of trees are a form of loneliness we climb like a ladder." Poet, musician, photographer, and teacher, he currently finds himself immersed in a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles in ascension, dreaming himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule called Fort Collins, Colorado, where he lives with his house plant Zebrina and his wind-up robot Nordstrom.