by Elizabeth Kerlikowske
If you let your sons win at card games, they will never learn strategy.
If you talk down to them using simple baby words, they won't understand complexity.
Because you don’t want them to fail, you don’t make them do anything hard.
You accept every lie because it is easier and more comfortable than checking up.
If your son is always where the trouble is, your son is the trouble.
Your son knows you will bail him out, make the excuse, buy him another car.
Hell, you might even buy him the gun he uses to murder a man and then
kill himself. Your love knows no bounds.
Author’s note: I saw something like this play out in my own life when my stepmother did provide the gun my brother used at the end of the poem because she could not say no to him.
Elizabeth Kerlikowske teaches ekphrastic writing at the Kalamazoo Institute of Art and volunteers at an alternative high school.
