Chad Parenteau


Alumni

I love reading about
how the classmate who ran
the school yearbook like
a Rupert Murdoch operation
and turned the campus paper
into a gossip rag fit
for people who mattered
now assembles lines of
Sloppy Joes for dress inspection
in a school her offspring
no doubt attend even though
she suspects poison from
enemies but only tests
her own secured meal
and even today when
she’s forced to revisit
old stomping grounds,
she makes certain that
her children’s footsteps
don’t even pick up dirt
in their sneaker’s grooves
and checks their clothes for even
the faintest speck of black
after crossing barely-there
bridges of char and ignoring
the kids when they ask
how they got that way
while they’re too nervous to wonder
why they even have to go
across them in the first place
or why they walk ahead of her.


Child At The Pet Store

If the shrieking over mom’s challenge
to his ownership of all the glassed creatures
culminates with the birds dropping
from their perches and the neighboring
mammals shivering their way to stillness,
two cage cleaners will instinctively
take the place of absent scholars
to debate whether this massacre
was intentional or not. Proof besides Jesus
that children equal a mysterious force,
which has demands that defy logic
and frightens you into speed of resolution
over understanding.


Housewarming Tips

Import overpriced plastic furniture
from your home state,
so you can claim to have
an authentic ethnic background
to the out-of-country club-hoppers
and local trust-fund refugees who will
exchange belief-like nods for wine.

Save the glasses they discard
and measure the liters
each was comfortable to leave unfinished.
It will equal the number of years
their future was paid for.

Later, when lying down
with the one who has the highest number,
leave on every light outside your room.
Imagine servants standing by,
burning their hands on bulbs to stay awake,
afraid to miss a summoning.


Poem

The spots of Spring grass
grow over those who said my
haikus lacked nature.


Jealousy

It’s,
my girlfriend’s
pet black cat,

her
bedroom’s wandering
apparition in negative,

casts
best shadow
in the morning.

Even
waking her
in mono-language,

she
never says
the wrong thing.