Lake Chelan, 1989
Vincent Antonio Rendoni
my mother tells it like this /
you were born to wander /
you could live in the water /
you would lose your head /
if it wasn’t screwed on /
she was drinking white zin /
buzzed by eleven am /
with her father and sister /
talking shit over cigarettes /
when i toddled off /
undetected, untraceable /
i made my way around the deep water /
crossed a busy intersection /
chasing my shadow in a parking lot /
before a stranger noticed /
they brought me back to my family /
the family tied me to a tree /
how could you do that to us /
then spent the next 30 years /
laughing about the whole thing /
Vincent Antonio Rendoni is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Dead Chicano Mixtape (Red Hen Press, 2027) and A Grito Contest in the Afterlife (Catamaran, 2022), winner of the Catamaran Poetry Prize as selected by Dorianne Laux. His work has appeared in AGNI, Prairie Schooner, Ninth Letter, Alaska Quarterly Review, and Pleiades. He has received support from the Jack Straw Cultural Center and Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. A born-and-raised Northwesterner, he currently resides in White Center, WA.
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