Today's poem is At the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia by Marita O'Neill. It is read by Gibson Fay-LeBlanc.
At the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia
One Sunday when I was twelve, I found a brown loafer,
flattened and deflated, in the middle of Roosevelt Boulevard.
When cars shrieked by, I ran out to snatch it, wondering
if it was my father's. If somehow that shoe explained why
I hadn't seen him for three days. In our neighborhood,
Mark McLaughlin's brother shot his father as he charged
after their mother for the last time. For weeks, with no one
watching, we stared at the police chalk figure of his father,
traced fingers along the sidewalk where his arms skewed
and jangle of legs were outlined. That year we took a school
field trip to the museum and bumbled through a giant heart,
shoving each other through rubber ventricles, aortas, and veins,
crouched through ham-pink arteries, pressed against its fleshy
walls where graffiti told us, You Suck and Blow Me. All the while
a stereo TA TUMMED and drowned us as we fumbled
in that heart's four quarters, neighborhoods of self and shadow
we were too young to inhabit or embrace: its hot song
calling, while we raced and stumbled to find the exit.