"The work to hold you"
Cobblestones rattle beneath your feet like loose teeth. You stand helplessly, waiting for me, waiting to drive me to school. The best dreams are when I remember you are dead but I can work to hold you in the long corridor of my sleep, can cable the pines lining Gallivan Boulevard to my most upright of memories and make time still as a corpse. Jesus, don’t stand in the middle of the street, Dad. Cars are coming. Dad, don’t be a fool as I am now, waking upright, moaning, lilting embryonic in the sea of your absence. Two years, I tell my therapist. Now your body’s in a ten-inch box, a thimble cove you crawled into to languish years free of Mom’s incessant shuffling. She was driven to pile and repile magazines, to—helplessly?— motor her mouth and motor on: “Work sucks. Who does my boss think he’s fooling? The neighbors are snooping, and the goddam laundry pile’s blocking out the sun.” Remember, Daddy, when we cooked her Christmas ham for Chanukah dinner? You told us to hush up and hold...