Natan Last

NATAN LAST

Ernest Ah Um

Our first place in Brooklyn—Prospect Heights, with its living room brick worn
and exposed, like authorless books showing empty sienna spines. For
the record, I wanted to wait ‘til I found steadier pay, but that could be never.
And Alice couldn’t wait. Saw the Angelo twins at a stoop sale
on Dean, hawking too-sweet lemonade, saw matching pink shoes
and she melted. Think, she said, ballet classes at the Y. She needed a baby--

something real to place there, in front of our lives. But man, making a baby
isn’t any cakewalk—it’s part-time work. The scheduled sex had me worn
out, skinny as Gandhi, and Alice even charted out the timing. We’d bought shoes
just like the Angelo twins had, pink, laceless, slots for
the kid’s toes to protrude. Alice was always the woker one, so at the stoop sale
I preempted, with a nameplate: LISA, gleaming in pink, never

thought she’d spring for it, but she did. Lisa for my mother, who never
had a girl to wrap in pink. Only me, her baby
boy, still baby-fat, baritoned, still choir-singing, the reckless sale
of pre-legal weed keeping me and Alice on Atlantic Ave. She’d worn
her black summer dress the day she learned I still dealt, for
church, was polishing my scuffed up shoes,

the ones my father owned, the buckles silver clovers. She lifted the shoes
then pointed at my ass--Your father’s gone, honey, but you know I never
stop being your mom, her voice so red, and for
the sake of Alice, for sake of my grandbaby,
stop this shit, now. Her mouth’s wrinkles worn
like only a mother’s, calm riverbeds plying her skin. So my sale

died away. Nights, I drove cabs again. There was a clearance sale
at Macy’s and I plunked a new credit card, proud. The shoes
became their own thing, another promise, and from my wallet’s well-worn
pockets I’d lift fresh twenties from tips. We stockpiled sneakers, sandals, boots. You never
saw so much pink cloth, man, or a wife so happy. But when our baby
girl finally entered this world, she was sick. For

three weeks she lay wrapped in a white room, and for
three weeks I howled, a folded up wolf. A hospital sign said, Sale
on Baby Blankets, and I wept harder as Lisa, my shoeless baby,
toddled her feet, covered only by glass and tubes. Alice looked at her shoes,
so I wouldn’t see the mass of tears. Do you think, she rasped, and I said, Never,
but three more days and Lisa was gone, pink shoes strung from my cab mirror,
never worn.

Man, when you lose a baby, tell me, what is there to live for.
My mom sold the never-worn shoes at another stoop sale,
sold the shoes, couldn’t hawk the nameplate. She walked on Atlantic, crying
as only mothers can, whispering in my singing voice, I never…

Natan Last is a graduate student in public policy and fellow at Columbia, working on refugee resettlement and migration policy. He also writes crossword puzzles for The New Yorker and The New York Times. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, The American Journal of Poetry, 2 Bridges Review, Protocols, The Rupture, Asheville Poetry Review, and Frontier Poetry.