Boy Dismantling a Superhero

 

 
 
 
        for Chance Castro
 
 
 
As a kid, I wondered if God took his coffee black

and at least four times a day.  My father did. And I

 

wonder, what’s the God-equivalent to catching

your father using the ring of a mug to tattoo landscape

 

designs on your mother’s table cloth? I wondered if God

had a front yard. I wondered if anyone has ever dropped

 

eaves on God, the way I did and overheard my father tell

my mother they were going to lose the house at the end

 

of the month. Does God know who Bret “Hitman” Hart is?

Because that’s the closest thing I knew of a superhero, and

 

at night, I’d throw on my dollar store sunglasses wrapped in

tin foil, the closest thing I had to mirrored shades, and wrung

 

the necks of my pillows. I wondered if God would chant

with the crowd as they called for the sharpshooter. When

 

I left nasty boy confounded on the floor, I wondered

if God had retirement and could borrow against it

 

to keep the house and landscape plans in full swing. I

understood superheroes to have the ability to identify

 

the weak spots on monsters, and what substance would

cripple evil. My father said snapdragons depend on

 

honeybees to make their red and yellow tongues grow.

This felt like knowledge worth remembering.
 
 
 

Aaron Reeder writes from Albuquerque and holds an MFA in Poetry from University of New Mexico. He is a recipient of the Rudolfo Anaya Fellowship, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Washington Square Review, Superstition Review, Literary Orphans, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Apeiron Review, Kudzu House Quarterly, Bitter Oleander, Black Tongue Review, The Great American Literary Magazine, and others. He is the author of the chapbook, DAWN (Orange Monkey Publishing, 2015).