The Brooklyn Rail

fathermouth

who said pivoting isn’t pressure
doesn’t come with its own headwind

sometimes i blame you
for decisions i made
say you defeated me
or i’m defeated by you

but really
i’ve been distracted by a demon
we’ve come to love

casting you out was elemental
rarely evental
just a slow bone-deep static

i learned to speak
in the afterimage
of your silence

once i believed forgiveness
a verb of distance
a poethic interval
a way to keep me holy
and far

but weather became scar
and you
a collapsed architecture
shaped my ick

you ghost me
until the form needs a body

your love
a clerical error

your dying
a murmur of mercy
in a drawl i outgrew
a quiet rehearsal
for my release

how strange to pray
for the one
who unmade my heart

every sentence i form
still limping toward you
hurt as inheritance
grammar as grief

half erased by time
i mouth your name
like an old psalm
each syllable a tether
each prayer
a failure at bittering

paper-cut daddy
you arrive by margin

daddy as fallacy
as systemic glitch
in my making
as flicker
as milky text

the body re-members
what silence re-fuses

your hot guinness breath
your brick absence
all untranslatable bruise

let’s call it ambivalence
though it’s become
our faith

i won’t fix my face
to make your need
look legal

still
i’ve dreamt your hands clean
a miracle
i no longer expect

the hum of a man relic
buried in lines of gore

i learned to speak
inside your fracture

“little girl”
is what you call me
after my existence
dragged your voice
into its own coffin
of memory

if time can atone
let rot turn scriptural
let my cells lay it down
before spirit reenters

let my back
be all the dispensation
you see

repair—
a thin reed of freedom
i keep digging into
spent earth

your mind now
a field of locusts
the past fluttering
you thin-skinned

what you sowed
blooms in ruin

pops,
there’s no grace left
to cosign

things are just
living
and dead
between us