Robert Cooperman		“A Mother’s  Love”               “A woman admitted that she helped her troubled, bullied 14-year-old son build               a cache of weapons by buying a rifle and gunpowder, but investigators still do               not know whether she was aware her son was planning a deadly school attack.”                         --New York Times   Was I to let my baby get beaten every day: his teachers, that principal blaming him because he wasn’t popular? I thought if he owned a rifle he’d have confidence.   It broke my heart to see him drag home bruised, skittish as a puppy in a thunderstorm, bull’s-eye-shiners, no appetite, no stomach for homework.   “What for?” he’d demand. “Teachers only care about jocks cheerleaders, and brainiacs.”   If I could’ve afforded a second rifle, I’d have helped avenge the bruises on his chest where jocks elbowed him, his arms and nose broken so often, ER doctors accused me of abuse.   And all because he wasn’t clever? Because he was overweight? Because we lived in a trailer? Because his old man took off, that stumble-bum piece of crap?   You watch your kid serve a never-ending sentence to smirking bullies, then tell me what you’d have done.		“Insane Desire” Searching your older brother’s desk drawer, for a pen or paper, you came across a pawed volume: Insane Desire, a cover that bucked your head back and goggled your eyes as you turned pages and read and read and read, not thinking such mad positions were possible, but here was proof in lubricious black and white.   Silent as a panther, your brother snuck up behind you, smacked the side of your head and snatched the book back.   “You’re not old enough,” he stuffed it into that drawer, though you knew he’d find another hiding place: a double agent who won’t be fooled into complacency a second time, though you turned his room and the house upside down for that holy piece of porn.   Years later, your brother unbelievably dead too young, you casually come across that title again, offered on Amazon, but this time not a mere two bits, but twenty-five precious dollars.   Still, you have to have it: not to pore over that crazed smut again, but one last relic to remember Martin by.