Sepia Seepage Circa 1952

Gerard Sarnat

When their names vanish like yesterday,
I pay a visit to the john.

Snapshots taped to the bathroom mirror:
Mac and my corduroy jacket

with that built-in belt unbuckled in front.
Kept there in case I forgot

next to Alexandra Lee picking us up
in her rugged nursery school van.

Mom demented, Daddio and the others gone
before Internet

once memories leak no trace, all evidence
is wiped off the face of this earth

except for those frayed photos.
Mac’s short hair and baseball cap stand behind

helping me aim their rifle
while her partner, Lill, smiles approvingly.

Both were colleagues of Mommy’s,
social work professors at the University of Chicago.

Pops asked, Since Mac ‘n Lill can’t have kids,
could they share us for the summer?

We’d drive through Watervliet, Michigan
where bearded Amishlike men from The House of David

played baseball in uniforms.
Lill taught me to fish for perch (I’d try to keep them alive

in an old trunk on the shore) in the oil-slicked
gas-smelling boathouse, how to row the dinghy.

Bunch of us’d motor to little islands to lunch
on meat-stuffed pasties — once or twice they let me steer.

Miss Lee (who wanted to be called Alex)
did not have children — I think.

Maybe the upbringing we soon rebelled from
wasn’t exactly straight?