By Michael Mark
Featured Art: “Lost Moment” by Mallory Stowe

My 98-year-old father steals cars
every day. It’s not uncommon
for him to take another at night, too. 

Sometimes he slips the keys
from an aide’s pastel pink scrubs
while they’re tying his shoes or,  

he tells me, he picks the pockets
of visitors of other residents—he sneers
saying that word. Most times, though,  

he steals his own—he’s been prohibited
from driving by his ophthalmologist,
audiologist, cardiologist, children,  

the State of New York. Often he’ll filch one
he sold last century or one he’s wrecked—
the green woody station wagon. He winks  

telling me he hot-wired his old man’s
‘31 yellow taxi cab. Lunch mostly
is when he makes his getaways. The food’s crap  

at The Home—more sneers, punctuated
with a dry spit—cold, mushy, same grey
thing over and over. He brings the cars back,  

tank filled to the exact spot
on the gauge as when he heists it. So nobody’s
tipped off. Weekday or weekend, 

makes no difference, he always ends up
at the same Burger King. On the way
he swings by the cemetery, picks up mom.  

She loves their nuggets.                                                     

  

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Michael Mark is the author of Visiting Her in Queens is More Enlightening than a Month in a Monastery in Tibet which won the 2022 Rattle Chapbook Prize. Some recent poems appear in Alaska Quarterly Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, 32 Poems and The Sun. His work appears in The Best New Poets, 2024. He received a Pushcart Prize, 2026. michaeljmark.com

Mallory Stowe is a painter interested in the awe and anxiety of the natural world. Her work reflects how systems of memory, whether in the body, the environment, or society, can perpetuate suffering or nurture empathy. Stowe received her BFA from Ohio University in 2022 and her MFA from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2025.