Read an Excerpt
My Old Man
When you're young, love rests awkward against your stomach,
wears a red hat, has your left lung tied to its wrist like a blue balloon
but my love wheezes like an old man when it sleeps...
I took away his typewriter because the keys kept me up all night
but now he scratches poems on the inside of my tongue.
I don't know how he gets up there...
He writes poems to big breasted women.
He writes poems to the bodies of women
and forgets to put the women in them...
My old man laughs like a grandmother with a shotgun
blowing my poems out of the skyNot good enough! Not good enough!
He falls in love with buildings.
He falls in love with what people leave behind them:
new hairpins and old architecture and apple cores...
I type love poems to my father that say This poem is clearly-phrased
and technical. It is not over-concerned with aesthetics...
It's like a raft from a desert island
or a boy whose father beat him until he joined Vietnam.
It survives no matter what.
Hopelessness crosses this poem's mind but not its heart.
This poem hopes with all its crossed heart for life.
This poem drinks principles, Father.
This poem coughs on itself, Father.
This poem coughs on itself because it's trying to be bigger
than the man who birthed it, but it's just these slung-up words,
just these makeshift words slung up in the mouths of strangers
to prop them open and let the light out,
this poem is broken on your knee, Father,
take it up like a necklace, like a wire box,
like a birdcage, like something functional,
like a sniper rifle, like divorce counseling
and place it on your shelf between The Power of Now
and How to Forgive your Abusive Parent
or inside the cover of How to Forgive Your Alcoholic Father On His Deathbed
then Raise your Children the Way He Should Have, the way you did,
take it into your arms the way you did,
teach this poem to forgive itself so it will stop beating me up from the inside,
hold it softly in your hands like a brittle leaf,
like a sunset you could eat like an orange,
like the apples in our backyard,
like the trees in our backyard you used to prune for us every summer,
like every summer igniting into autumn
in our chests
in licks of red flame and copper wire
and piano notes I want to hang for you in the sky.