Mama’s Boy

for Michel Tournier, The Four Wise Men At least once a month a man boards a bus bound for Detroit, one bag, a few books. Nevertheless he always tells himself I just might leave Cincinnati for good just cut out never look back... When he arrives in the Motor City he drinks and drinks it all in until he’s dead drunk on all fours, a two-year-old mama’s boy, bawling all night night after night for the salt-sweet milk of his sister-mother turning in her sleep from a hard back turning toward the Canadian border... When at long last he takes a bus back to the Queen City, long after the only rest stop, he notices the first signs: merciless thirst, gorging hunger, swollen ankles, what the folks down south call sugar.