Bonapartes and Sharks

Around the time my father succumbed
to stroke, my brother collapsed in Dallas
from heart failure & my nephew took off

clear to Clearwater with his mother’s Glock
in a stolen Chevy I realized it was going
to be a long year. I feared my psychologist

would turn my files over to my health insurance
provider or a state hospital. I tell her I suffer
from Acute American Anxiety. Call it AA 

plus another A. Then the Parkland shooting
just south of us and my daughter lost
her cellphone & didn’t return texts all day.

My son starts asking about death. He’s seen
enough Disney movies to believe death
happens exclusively to the old and evil.

A barracuda gobbled Nemo’s mother
in a fade-out. In Moby Dick, Melville defends
killer whales. We are all killers, on land 

and sea, he says, Bonapartes and Sharks included.
When my wife returns home from work I greet her
like she’s escaped from county prison. I lock

doors, shut lights off early, perform nightly
bed checks on my children. I transform
myself into a warden. Grandma always said

birds don’t sing in cages but cable news
convinces this alpha to keep his kin closed off
from the world whose language makes murderers

out of crows, conspirators of ravens, and worst
of all, a committee of turkey vultures resting
with parliamentary patience on our roof’s ridge.