Featured: Week of June 10 (Father’s Day)
In honor of Father’s Day, coming up on Sunday, June 16, this week’s contributors honor fathers. Jean C. Howard’s poem, “My Dad Comes Back as a Sparrow,” is a gentle remembrance of a father who’s passed away. In Lenny Levine’s humorous fiction piece, “Questionable Behavior,” parents cope with a common parenting dilemma. Jay Carson’s poem, “Elevator,” takes an imaginative trip through one family’s history. Lyn Lifshin’s poem, “Photograph,” describes a beloved family...
Read MoreTo My Son, At 7½ Mos, From First Class
Today I must leave you for a city that, like you, will not sleep. I am burning our ancestors to get there. I am going to have the beef short ribs. I am going to buy a new hat. One day you will tell me, Dad, that hat looks silly. You will be too honest. Right now you are kicking your poor mother. She can feel you below her ribs. She forgives you in labored breaths. She forgives me that I cannot rest my hand on her womb and say, Calmate. Sheket. You know my voice through the thickness of muscle. Already you know my touch. I think you may be magic. Perhaps you are the Messiah. I leave you today...
Read MorePhotograph
My father sister and I in the trees with our hair blowing. My sister as usual has something in her hands and grins in a way no one could say no to, dancing in restaurants until she pulls in to herself at 19 like the turtles she collects. But here she’s the sweet pouter, my father’s pockets bulge with things, the gum he’ll give us in the brown chair later reading the funnies. I’ve got a little pot and my arms are heavy, my father touches us both lightly as if he’s not sure we’re...
Read MoreElevator
My hands still tremble sometimes at the drop of a voice, Dad’s disapproval Not To dialect. I am in the port of Svakia, Crete alone at a table across from the local toughs, like my high school fraternity; they send me back in time and space. “Keep away from the moving wall” the sign on the old Greek elevator says, when it’s perfectly clear, not the wall, but we are moving. I know, for now, I am my father sitting worried in fourth grade openly cheating because, he said, the test was unfair. Or was his father? He was liberated by France and its lovely wine which he doted on for years. I...
Read MoreQuestionable Behavior
Dear Addie, I must confess, my husband Bill and I are not regular readers of your column, but we hope you won’t hold it against us. A good friend of ours said that if anyone can help us, it’s you, so here goes: Our eleven-year-old son Toby will not stop asking questions. From the moment he opens his eyes in the morning ’til he reluctantly closes them at night, it never ends. And I mean that literally. Just today, when I woke him for school, the first words out of his mouth were, “Mom, where is sleep?” “What do you mean, honey?” I asked him. “When you go to sleep, where do you...
Read MoreMy Dad Comes Back as a Sparrow
on the anniversary of his death On this day with sky, not sky, but more like soil sinking into lungs, You decide to visit as a sparrow, dark earthen stripes shooting lightning shrill across your head, then racing, as summer, along your wings. Not content to sit and peer into the window’s mirror, you chat small bird news to those beyond And tilt your bead eyes into my room, throat opening up to tell of ice and hard, rich pellets ant-sealed within the feeder’s varnish, Of how one boxelder bug stops to lure with fiery wings, propped safe inside, within a flowerpot. You stop and lift...
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