By Dan Albergotti

Featured art by Paul Gauguin

After talking with him for thirty minutes,
as he lay cocooned in a thin wool blanket,
I told my father I had to head back to Conway.

After talking with him for thirty minutes,
as he lay cocooned in a thin wool blanket,
I told my father I had to head back to Conway.

He turned his ashen head a bit and said, Conway . . .
that’s where my son lives. I met my sister’s eyes
before fixing his in mine to say, Father, I am your son.

His eyes widened in that way that makes
us say, You look like you’ve seen a ghost,
or as if he’d found himself the quarry of a hunt.

I touched his hand before I left to show him
I was real. I think I could have walked through walls to
get to my car, so grateful was I to be that ghost.

---

Dan Albergotti is the author of Millennial Teeth (SIU Press, 2014) and The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008), as well as two chapbooks: The Use of theWorld (2013) and Of Air and Earth (2019). His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, The Southern Review, The Best AmericanPoetry 2017, and two editions of The Pushcart Prize. He teaches at Coastal Carolina University.