YARD SALE//Ronnie Sirmans

YARD SALE

        (Circa Gen X childhood)

I want to fight with men,
but Mom is trying to get rid
of the green army of plastic,
tough little helmeted GIs,
crawling, pointing, attacking,
losing brothers one at a time
to the horrors of my boyhood.

Mom even thinks my tube socks,
which I make sure she always
washes with Clorox, are sellable,
this familiar fabric that’s jostling
for space in my dresser drawer with
regular white briefs I crumpled up
like weathered pugilists in old age.

Even her so pristine pantyhose, like
worn by crooks on TV and in movies,
such tight skin-toned nylon disguising
men’s identities but not their violence,
and even plastic eggs, which birthed some
of the hosiery like nongelatinous jellyfish,
sit out for strangers to fondle if they wish.

Our personal effects lie upon the ground,
atop tables, inside boxes. Haphazardness
lets folks imagine that someone got angry
and threw our stuff out in somewhat orderly
fashion, and then in a pang of contriteness,
lightly affixed stickers to show our worth.

The sun beats down on familiar shirts
just like when Dad used to wear them.
Cartoon characters are emblazoned upon
drinking glasses warming in the sunlight
and dreaming of coldly sweet Kool-Aid.

Paperback novels with heroes on the covers
dry out like tomatoes someone can use
later in a bread recipe, after kneading and
punching the dough like untoned muscle.

Mom keeps going back and forth
in the house, making me stand guard
by sitting in a plastic chair that’s also
for sale. Sometimes she comes out
with new trinkets, little things that
caught her eye one last time, commerce
of the day making her get carried away.
If she could make it fit in a plastic bag,
she might even take an offer for the house.

There’s my old belt with the big metal square buckle,
gold that my soft touch has rubbed to even faker silver.
It has been my pro wrestling world championship belt,
my silly friends taking turns being my tag-team partner,
waiting in the corner of our imaginary ring as I’d stretch
my palm so far out for their touch, ready to hit opponents
so hard, our creased foreheads never bleeding like on TV.

What we have, you will buy. And someone always does.
An old man comes and looks at the price tag on the chair
where I provide my seated security for this amateur sale.
“What a low price for such a nice young man,” he says
and winks. I smile. I blush. I give him a bashful glance,
and I figure it’s the sun that blinds us both for a moment.

Ronnie Sirmans is an Atlanta-based digital platforms editor whose poems have appeared in The Georgia Review, Tar River Poetry, South Carolina Review, OutWrite Journal, Impossible Archetype, Journal of the American Medical Association, and elsewhere.