The Night Bone Thugs-n-Harmony Reunited

My father is a learned magician,
morphing fingers through the flesh of his stomach
to wish that the seamed scar would fish out
decades-old nine-millimeter fragments
layered short like staccato notes.
He traces their origins,
fleeing from the park named after victory.
His hands blister,
depleted and dripping with red wax
before disappearing in a smoke snap
and he tucks the city’s secrets with him,
a double-edged sword
suctioned through his nose
because the conundrum of bullet wounds
is that they are still prone
like a mandolin’s sound hole
busied by bronze strings,
ordering their beginnings
be remedied, or at least
reconsidered to nothingness.
I ask the city for my father’s return,
stow his picture to each passerby
ignoring the vortex of its history,
a needle slipping from vinyl.
The year on back is ’88,
he blesses the foam from a forty ounce,
belly-dances the concrete to survival with a broom stick
buffed with steam and blood,
a keffiyeh tied at the waist
spinning like an inferno,
and I tell myself
that the music must be true
to keep his magic for this long.