Dear Daddy

You put your hand on my leg in the movies.

I wanted you to stop.

You hugged me.

I wanted you to stop.

You smiled at me.

I wanted you to stop.

Imagine being afraid of a stranger,

Imagine that stranger was your father.

Signed your 8 year old daughter.

Some memories
are like
a cigarette
whose firey ends
burn a mark
upon your favorite linen
while you look elsewhere
and as you're able
to hide it from others
you know
it will always be there

your hands
calloused with the evidence of hard work and pain
your arms
strong and thick from carrying the burdens of life
your back
solid and sore from constant stress
your eyes
sunken and tired

but oh your hands
so soft when they trace my lips
your arms
so tender when you hold me
your back
supporting me through every affliction
your eyes
filled with nothing but love

Each year, we arrive at the same knot of woods, having drawn the same straw.
We grasp, trembling, at what we imagine to be certain death:
A leaf, edges curved up, orange crudely splashed across green.

But would you spare a second thought for the falling leaf that subsumes your life?
Think. Why would the world continuously dash herself
Into pieces, render herself to ash, if she were not made of
Such stuff as phoenixes? Nature goes up into flames each year
With little to no ado, and heals herself without fuss.

Leaves throw themselves from great heights not in pursuit of ruination but of
Revival. Year after year after year we are asked this much:
Allow me to unfurl the fist with which you are clinging to this tree.
Comfort lies in confiding, confessing, and conceding. There is no need to be
Stronger than the Earth’s heart when she is offering it up
To you so singularly. Grant yourself this: that she wants you to
      Smile and shine and grow.

Do you fear your fate in this moment? You misinterpret.
The blameful breeze you imagine you feel is, in actuality,
Earth’s unremitting whisper, pressed into your skin:
“Do as the leaves do. Follow, and fall. You are forgiven.”

Art
is a way
of survival.

It repairs the heart.

We were drinking coffee when
depression showed up at the door of the home we built, pounding.
Eviction notice in hand,
your soul parceled out into donation bins.
Foreclosure sign,
caution tape around the chest that I slept on for a year.

I sit out in the sun
to bleach the tan line from my ring finger.
I hold cold cups and shake strangers’ hands
to erase the mould of your grasp from mine.
I want to sear off my palms.

I miss even those nights when you looked at my fire and laughed.
So I make you coffee (but I know I make it wrong);
your ghost in this house still criticizes.

I made you coffee every day because it was all I could do;
my only way of getting into you, a vector.
As the hot brew flowed past your heart, I watched,
like a child at Christmas, hoping you’d feel my love.
Hoping the glaze would clear up from your eyes.

I only wish this were a bond that stayed,
that stayed when your mind put plugs in your ears:
when I screamed and screamed that I loved you,
that I’d rock every little thing you regret to sleep.

I went to the doctor about this dizziness.
He checked my ears, he asked why my eyes were red.
This vertigo--a hurricane made by the page turning in my life.
I am a bag in your wind.

The day you left I wrote you a recipe for how you like your coffee,
because you don’t know, but I have it memorized.
My handwriting changes halfway down the page, as I change,
as you drive farther and farther away.

Our love is a child I’ve carried,
now I’m bent over, sick.
Loss took your place in our home,
but it’s unsteady on its feet;
I have to walk it from room to room.

My name has been yours, possessive.
And although these days I correct myself and say ‘I’ during speech,
My thoughts are still ‘we.’
I still think about your lungs when I cough.

So I still make us coffee every day (but I know I make it wrong).