On the 23rd Death Anniversary of My Father

My body reaches down into a bottle of gin

to make a world out of something close to death.

We were never meant to be alive,

to be 25 and a chandelier broken

into a million fragments of light.

Father allowed the bees escape from the beehive.

Here's the sting, here's the sound of fear,

here's your father's face carved into the day

breaking the world across your back,

here's all his memories burning down your bones.

The wound hurts in its softest part.

During the war a father saved the severed head

of his daughter, he talked to it until a rotten

head talked back.

Here's your father's head in your bosom,

Here's your mouth begging for love,

for his tongue to show you a way home.

Here's your father saying you can't teach

a dead man how to love.

All the rivers come into you,

which means water is never enough

to save a man falling from the sky.

I have learnt to love every broken thing

the way a man learns to live with a memory that doesn't die.

I have learnt to carry my father's body in my heart like a son

that inherits a knife cut without flinching.

Source: Sacrament of Bodies (University of Nebraska Press, 2020)