Can you bring it? my son breathes
into the phone from middle school.
He’s forgotten his homework
again. The last time, I lie,
scraping ice off the windshield,
mittening the fob into the ignition.
The minivan’s engine whistles
like a revived heart.
Past my junior-high school
resurrected as an elementary,
past my elementary school
chronically for sale,
the raised railroad tracks I wanted
to rage my Bonneville over
like Steve McQueen.
Past the package store where
Ronnie, with his fake ID,
bought us Schmidt, thinking
it’d make us like him.
Past the new housing development,
the practice field where my son
tried football last fall. Tundra now,
so white it blinds—still, something
lives. I pull over, back up. It’s
the wind, gusting the tattered
coat of a hunched jackrabbit.
No—more—twenty, maybe thirty,
dotting the field. Thirty soiled mops.
Thirty mini yaks. Thirty—
how old I was when I left home,
went overseas, learned the language,
married my wife, who gave birth to my son.
I wish we’d stayed, despite the war. There,
he wouldn’t have forgotten his homework—
too many relatives reminding him.
Wouldn’t have forgotten his mother tongue,
or our love for him. Ahead, where
the sidewalk ends, a hooded woman
unhooks the leash from her beagle.
Already I hate her for disturbing their peace.
The beagle bolts over the snowy field,
the jackrabbits bounding like deer,
the dog only a muzzle away.
But this is how it stays—
the jackrabbits know exactly
what they’re doing.
Lolling, the beagle returns,
surrenders to its leash.
How long before a committee
of concerned homeowners
decides, in the interest of shrubbery,
to resort to poison? A year,
maybe two, the empty lots
will fill with split-levels. Fences.
A manmade lake. A roundabout
with a clock. The jackrabbits
will go. My son will wonder
where he belongs, too.
Yahya Frederickson is the author of In a Homeland Not Far: New & Selected Poems (Press 53, 2017), The Gold Shop of Ba-‘Ali (Lost Horse Press, 2014), and five chapbooks, including Khumásiyát: Poems from the Moroccan Desert (Finishing Line Press, 2025) and The Birds of al-Merjeh Square: Poems from Syria (Finishing Line Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in Arts & Letters, The Georgia Review, The Louisville Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mizna, New Moons, Ninth Letter, North Dakota Quarterly, Poem-a-Day, Prairie Schooner, RHINO, The Southern Review, Witness, and elsewhere. A former Peace Corps Volunteer in Yemen and Fulbright Scholar in Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Kyrgyzstan, he’s a professor of English at Minnesota State University Moorhead, on Dakota and Anishinaabe lands.
