Mather Schneider

Shorts

My hand trembles
as I draw my mother’s face
from memory

 

Listening to The Art of War audiobook
narrator’s voice so soothing
I doze off

 

In the dump
I stand in the smoldering garbage
cleaning my eyeglasses

 

I do jumping jacks on the beach
I was in jail long ago
the world goes up and down

 

The street, the soccer goal net,
your eyes
all empty on Sunday morning

Sitting In the Bar Car On the AMTRAK While a Storm Moves In Over Illinois In the Springtime

I’m inside this box rattling
toward a cemetery called Swan Lake

near my old town
where they will lower into the ground

another box, a smaller box.
From the train window

the farther away the farmhouse
the slower it moves by,

the more gently time seems
to touch it, and the farm boy

who stands near the tracks
with his eyes wide as flattened pennies

grows as we move toward him
and then he’s gone in a whiplash.

A woman at another table
begs her mother to tell her

why men are so distant,
why people leave, why things

have to be this way.
Her mother doesn’t know 

and the woman begins to cry.
I stand to go to the bathroom

and when the train lurches I
stumble into her and spill her drink.

She begins to scream
and bat at her wet blouse

while her mother tries to calm her.
I tell her, I’m sorry,

I’m so sorry,
as the heavy green trees

beyond the glass
shake in the wind

like giant wet dogs
in slow motion. 

I’m inside this box
rattling toward a cemetery

called Swan Lake
near my old town

but there will be no swans. There
have never been any swans.

Boss

Suegra’s car wouldn’t start, wouldn’t even
turn over.
Suegra is my mother-in-law.
Me and Ubaldo and Enrique stopped our bullshitting
and looked under the hood
like a rabbit might pop out
until Suegra told us to fuck off
and called the cheapest mechanic she could find
on the internet.
He came over on the bus,
stepped down with a walking stick and a tool box.
He was blind.
A blind mechanic, just when you think
you’ve seen it all.
He fiddled around under the hood with his fat fingers.
We all goofed and craned our necks thinking
this can’t be happening,
who is this crazy old blind man?
He said he needed a part from parts store.
Enrique was the soberest so he went and got it.
The blind man felt it and said,
I need the other kind, boss.
Enrique went back to the store again
pissed off and muttering.
When he returned it took the blind man
awhile but he got it in there.
Fire her up, the blind man said.
Suegra got in and sure enough the old beast came to life.
She paid the blind man and he felt
the bills and was satisfied.
He gathered his tools without missing a single one
and tapped his cane off to the bus stop
while we sat back down with our beer cans
and turned away
from Suegra’s devastating bloodshot eyes.  

 

Mather Schneider has a new novel called Corn Chips published by Anxiety Press. He lives in Tucson and works as an exterminator.