Watermelon
behind the rind
a succulent kiss
of summer
My mother demands I share my location with her
because I’m leaving the country.
An app on my phone becomes a digital leash.
I nearly killed myself throughout my twenties
but now she suddenly gives a fuck where I am.
When I was having panic attacks in my
parked car at night
all through my freshman year,
trust that she did not care.
“I’m going to know where my child is,”
she says to me.
She brags it to her friends,
showing off her control.
I nearly fell into selective mutism
after college
because I felt so angry and invisible.
She has never known where I really am.
For the first time in four days
I woke not completely
Obliterated by depression
No noose around my neck
No chain to my step
More roses than thorns
Thunder and horns
Father’s Day has passed
Two text messages from
Two sons was the only gift
No word from my father
In decades and decades
Before that more silence
His lost is my detachment
Life’s funny disorder
There was nothing unique
About growing up in the
90’s father-less
But unlike the cicadas cry
Cycles break and I pass on
No fatherless existence
And I take the hits
Privilege goes unappreciated
But what would be worse is
The guilt of knowing I made
Anyone grow up feeling
As I felt
A forgotten burden
An unloveable storm
A ghost
A curse
Spilling heart out with
Knuckles to dry wall
Shot out car windows
The slamming of a red door
The amount of fear a small
Child can carry is tremendous
Some will take sips
Other will take a puff
But it’s never enough
Until you fill the hole
In your chest that our
Parents left
And those chains rot away
When I hug my sons and
It’s like Spring again
We stand tall as the three
Pillars of a new home
He liked to believe that
The narrative of his life
Followed some meaningful,
Discernable arc.
But the closer he got
To the end,
The more people he knew
Who died long before
There was any recognizable plot.
They just died
Right in the middle of their story.
As though death
Was not some great culmination
But an inconsequential blip
In someone else’s saga.
Maybe he is not the star of his own story.
Maybe he is just an extra on the set
Of someone else’s epic.
Or maybe a foreign film,
A language he does not speak,
Blundering around the set
In a costume that does not fit.
, and the shitty mascara
that you got on clearance
one night after work.
They call you too much.
Dark glitter eyeshadow,
and an eyeliner wing that could kill a man
is all you need to feel yourself
when the detatchment creeps in.
Call it something to survive.
Teenage me: the boys
i looked into the deep brown eyes of a sad basset
he paused ~ breathed lightly with a heavy sigh
tilted his head ~ eyes reaching up to heaven . . .
i look at my new friend and wonder what it’s like
to live in a shorter than short world . . .
with a keener than keen snout . . .
he cocks his head and begins to speak . . .
“You know, we teach people how to treat us . . .” he drools
looking into his eyes i smile . . .
“thank you Mr. Basset, i shall remember your wisdom!”
“You can call me Bogie . . .”
“Thanks Bogie!”
