37 El mundo
Even in dreams, your father is working,
and in the version you’d been having for weeks,
he lifts a large replica of the world, places it
on his back, and because his body here defies
logic and physics, carries it up a hill, which,
after you wake up, you know is a metaphor
for twelve-hour shifts, for pounding nails
into wood, for sliding steel into slots again
and again, and for the days when his back
is shaped into a crooked punctuation,
and his feet, marking the floor into a hieroglyph,
have lost more of their purpose, becoming quiet
when he gets home, so that all you see of him
is not comparisons to language, but two
swollen limbs, a body reclined on a La-Z-Boy,
a father relieved to call this silence his own.
Copyright Credit: Poem copyright ©2021 by Esteban Rodríguez, “37 El mundo” from Wildness Issue No. 2, August, 2021. Poem reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher.