Tag: Parenting

Dispatches From the Interior

.Reading time 3 minutes.

By Geoffrey Brock

Featured Image: “A Lone Child Walking Down the Street at Night“, Unknown Artist

Like the one where you stumble along happily drunk
after closing a bar and reach your car only to find it
surrounded by militia who take you in to question you
about why you left your son alone in the car so long
and you say I lost track of time though that’s not true
and Can I see him and they refuse and Is he okay and
you’re panicking and thinking What if he died in there
or the one the very next night when you find yourself
atop some posh hotel listening to some poet speaking
and realize you haven’t seen your son since morning
when you let him go down to the lobby alone to play
despite the warnings you now recall about the natives
and you race for the elevator but there is no elevator
and so you find the stairs and descend floor by floor
and each landing is a shabby apartment living room
and though you can sometimes tell someone is home
water running for instance or light under a shut door
you never see anyone or gain any real insight into this
country of ancient dearth and modern resentment
what country is this anyway? and after the gauntlet of
these empty private foreign lives you emerge at last
into a brightly lit and darkly paneled colonial lobby
and scramble frantic now through the patrician crowd
looking for help but when you ask a giant suited man
if he speaks English he replies in the plummiest nasals
I don’t just speak it I am it and merely cocks one brow
about your son so you race outside where a boy squats
alone in the penumbra by a bush and you tilt his face
to the light but he isn’t yours too small and dark and
you keep looking and see others and scream one name
and then oh god you see his hunched familiar shape
rise out of the pile of dead leaves he had hidden under
and stumble toward you arms extended the pajamas
he was wearing this morning now tattered and filthy
and when you scoop him up you discover obscenities
and anti-American slogans scrawled in black marker
on his face and blood or something caking his nostrils
and he doesn’t speak or cry and nothing shines forth
from those eyes and you carry him cradle him through
this endless third-world night trying to comfort him
but knowing you will never be able to comfort him but
cooing You’re safe now Daddy’s here or the one where

Read More

Saying Goodbye to Dad

.Reading time 5 minutes.

by Kate Fetherston

Feature image: Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Near the Lake, 1879-1880. The Art Institute of Chicago.

My dad died alone in a VA hospital
as July sun beat without mercy into the raw

seesaw of breath busting seams between
each cell. Third spacing doctors call it

when cell walls no longer sustain
boundaries with integrity, fluid

sluices into interstitial no-man’s
land and overpowers whatever little

plans were made for a garden and some
trees. When my brothers and I got

the news and flew in from the various
places to which we’d fled, I’d just split

on my first lover after years of her
threatened suicide, bouts of drunken

depression, and refusals to take
her medicine too numerous

to recount. Her view: I’d been trained
strictly for fixer-uppers, too stupid

or stubborn to leave, but, waxing
romantic, she’d croon, “You’ll do me

for a rough old mate.” The day she smashed
my stuff into the carpet and poured

ten pounds of flour over
everything, I might have stayed for

more of the same, but I threw
crumpled clothing into my pack,

startled when she whispered, “I’m
just like your crazy

old man, aren’t I?” I didn’t
answer because we both knew

Read More

Cake

.Reading time 2 minutes.

By Mark Kraushaar

Featured Image: Landscape by Peter von Bemmel 1685-1754

She’s in the first booth left of the planters.
She’s been waiting an hour now.
She’s been waiting at the Watertown Family Buffet
with her little girl who’s dreamed up
some kind of a costume:
giant glasses, backwards cap, taffeta gown
which is clearly for him, for Al who’s
just now arriving, finally, and now

he’s seen them, and now
he’s walking over, and now
he’s standing there, standing there,
husband and father, or boyfriend and father,
or boyfriend and father figure, except he’s way too late,
he’s too late times two and the party’s over
thank-you, and, no, they’re not having,
not the grin, not the story, not the hug.

The woman gets up, and then, face baggy with patience,
she nods to the girl who scoots out too,
and they exit together.
So over the chips and spilt dip,
over the drained Pepsi and the big white cake
with “Al” in caps and quotes
he watches them go,
looks out at the parking lot,
opens his book.
Here’s the waitress with her pad and pen.
And what in hell is he reading?

Read More

Degeneration

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Stefi Weisburd

Featured Art: Stoke-by-Nayland by John Constable

Through the forest’s dark persistence, hugging
the relentless road, you search the inevitable
for the sad address, then find yourself paused

in front of the driveway, just
before your halogens startle the dim
windows, the porch out of joint, in that moment

before you are knotted irrevocably
to the future, to her avocado refrigerator whining
like a beast, its gullet full of Ice Age ice cream and the odd

trap-sprung mouse in a Ziploc, before the legions
of art magazines piled in solemn cairns and the Old Countries
purpling her arms, her throat’s

dry drapery and the keys to abandoned
rooms clutched
like a crucifix. In that moment

before her body slips
out of itself and she dampens the floor, before
her ears traffic in the static of her dead

father’s scolding, before her dull
doe eyes fever with fury and shadows hunch like Dante,
before she calls you “Mother,” demanding

you wipe her ass, before her heart cherries and
Tolstoys, in that moment, turned in the driveway, before
all that, back out. Gun it.

Read More

Miss Peach Considers #8: Reproduce

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Catie Rosemurgy

A paperweight of sorts.
A shiny genetic clip for the stack of notes she’s become
on carbon dating, lozenges, and “getting over it.”

On a park bench she could lean over
to the other stunned, unmade-up mothers
who stare like cruelly unfinished paintings.
She could say, we are the giant price tags
that once hung off them.

A penny to toss in the well.
Mindlessness held together by bones.
Something that happened once in the distance,
like a war or an arctic expedition.

A list of ways she would try not to feel about a son or a daughter.
A list of choking hazards and a list
of times she will have peeled back the curtain
for him or her by age seven.
A list of golf courses and shades of blue.

Her penmanship begins to pile up and look like sticks,
like an attempt at a tiny fire left on a stone.

Read More

Miss Peach Considers the Human Condition

.Reading time 1 minute.

By Catie Rosemurgy

Featured Art: A Bouquet of Flowers by Clara Peters

It’s OK to feel important.

The swelling between our legs
indicates we are the rarest of flowers.

We bloom in only the most
idiosyncratic conditions: rubber,

misery, great shoes. The other day

I realized that we can’t spit
without hitting grass or something else

that implies the necessity
of our experience, of our greatness.

Read More