We are driving toward a shallow lake off of I-95; imagine my mouth is a water fountain.
By the lake there are woods and in the deep mouth of those woods, we lay with burnt legs. I thought mostly of my father and of the bed that I slept in when I was three years old. I thought about grandfather’s hands, too, stained with beer and old milk.
Thought: this is what it will be like the day you give birth. Thought: the trees are bent at their waists the way my brother always is; he sinks into riverbed silt.
I remember you always smelling like smoke. In a daydream, I tell you that you are stuck like blood in the back of my cruel throat. I have never hated my father more than I do now, with his gut hanging over his knees like hot, solid fur.
That entire time, we were awful drivers, and swimmers, and poets.
Last edited by orbweaver on Wed Oct 07, 2026 3:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
It is October. These past few Octobers, I am still a small wrinkle in a bassinet. Mother and Father are still new parents. They never listened to Grandfather, just cradled me like a bundle of empty beer bottles.
Even now, I’ve never seen either of my parents drink, but I can hear them screaming, at night, about me, mostly, sounding like whorls of fingerprints being rubbed together in the wrong direction. My body is so often being rubbed together in the wrong direction: a stomach that feels like moths, or eggs boiled incorrectly, too soft or too hard. My stomach growls, often. It tightens, often, too, thousands of screwdrivers in my throat.
If Grandfather could see me now, he would cry. In a story, a boy and his dog are having trouble moving their sled down a steep and snowy mountain, but in the end, they succeed, sliding down the mountain the way hands do across large bellies. I am not a boy (I am a man), I do not own a dog, or a sled. These nights, I stay up late curled on the floor of the kitchen or the bathroom, clutching at my body, at the swole of my abdomen,
Nyack, NY: a man sits cross-legged in the middle of a road with a dog sprawled across his lap, next to him there is a woman with an empty mouth (no ice, no teeth).
Nyack, NY: I am not one of them. At night, I hold scissors to my feet the way bottles were once held to my young newborn face. Mother, a decade ago, did you think I’d be in a hospital?
White Plains, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Westchester Division: there is a boy there who loves football and tells me that the two of us were born like twins. I have never cared for (American) football.
White Plains, New York Presbyterian Hospital, Westchester Division: there is a girl who, at dinner time, hides the bread rolls in her fleece, her fleece purple like my father’s face was the day he proposed to my mother in a restaurant, in Swansea.
Upstate NY: I do not cry. I kiss five girls in twelve months, and for each one, I feel like I am kissing my hand. For each one, I feel like I am kissing the sidewalk, or a magazine, and I want to apologize to you. I want to kiss you, or write poetry, or be cruel.
You keep asking me about my hometown. I tell you, then: there were fish in the river, there must have been. Once, my brother and I stood knee-deep in July and watched something silver turn beneath us.
Would I be lying if I said I loved my brother? Would I be lying if I told you who I loved?
Imagine: my parents when they slept with snakes, my parents when they died, every night, in cycles, like monthly blood; you are wearing jeans newly stained and think that you have killed a man. There are still times when I think that you are killing men, or boys, by accident, because of all the milk swirling around inside of your collarbones.
(There are still times when I think that you've killed me).
I see you now as a ghost: did you know when two ghosts marry, we are a horizon over a snaky river? We are flying back to the town of my birth, over rivers that remind me of your crow's feet. Look how I am falling into the water, look how I can’t get up.
in response to Matthew Zapruder's "Come On All You Ghosts"
I. . I see what you mean about fathers; lately my father has been the only ghost I know. He mostly stands in doorways, mostly to say goodnight.
II.
Please tell me more about what it’s like to listen to your father cough. Mine never has; I wasn’t even born yet when someone stole his lungs, hid them away in a graveyard.
III.
I think I want a keychain like yours. No, not a keychain, but something just as much a corpse. Mostly, just a portrait of my father, or maybe, I’ll take your keychain and onto it I’ll paint the portraits of everybody’s fathers.
IV.
I tell you that I was not born to new parents; sometimes, I think this is the first mistake I ever made.
The two of us pick chicken eggs in a heat as sticky as your mother’s breath. The heat that rises off of the lake in the late-summer feels worse than any awkward kiss.
Your body is taller today, your hair slightly lighter. We pick chicken eggs for our mothers. Our mothers wear red dresses, as red as the entrails of flies, and they sit out on porches, drink ghostly milk from white-and-blue glasses. We watch them drink the milk, and we picture them as newborns.
How many calories are in a glass of milk? How many calories are in the shadow of a tree? We and our eggs sit underneath the shadow of the largest tree we can find, with me trembling, without tears, without vomit, just a wooly mouth. Today, I’ve never missed anything as much as I miss my own ribs, all twenty-four of them. Today, you look beautiful like the largest cow.
Today, where are my fingers? They used to be so long. Once, you were afraid to touch me.
