Dad’s Death Turns Three

It has begun
                 walking. It has said its first words
                                 and they are roundabout and rowboat. Hail

and catapult. It likes rhyme. Alliteration.
                 For months it’s been able to sing
                                 itself asleep. Still I am always checking

for signs of life
                 in the night. I’ve started to wonder
                                 who it’ll grow to be. Its sharp teeth lost

to a softer surface underneath. We drive west
                 to Crescent City and meet thousand-year-old trees,
                                 retrace steps to places Dad

once took me. At the headwaters
                 of the Mississippi, the same obsidian
                                 leeches find homes in-between

our toes. It has forgotten
                 the pandemonium
                                 of its birth. Days all its eyes could see

were more eyes. It has started
                 to wonder how
                                 I meant things; if I ever lived

without it. We tour the crystal caves
                 of the Dakotas, experience total deprivation
                                 of sight. We don’t talk about our feelings

after 10pm, it’s a rule. I build us
                 a house out of quicksilver and
                                 slate. We stay up most nights and talk

about the universe. How it moves
                  like catapulting
                                 hail. Sublime. Generous.

Breadwinner

He blinks picket fence. Forgets days before street planted under his feet. Forgets guitar. His songs sandpaper the walls, grate new smoothness until spent to dissipation. He used to sing The first days are the hardest days / Don't you worry anymore. His calloused fingers lose their music to tar, his mouth to mudroom. Shingles blanket him like skin. His one rebellion, a dandelion garden where there should be uniform earth—grass precise in shade and height. His nails are too short to sprout sidings; in storms he shakes, his junctions ache. Some call him unhinged. He aspired to craftsman, saw his future in rafter and pillar, but grows split-level ranch-style—squat, hopeless, there's no addressing him. They say In thirty years you may still metastasize a bay window. A sunporch. A hearth. All he wants are a few quiet ghosts for the basement of his toes. Something one-step on the stove. Before he was brick and mortar he was a normal father, a real man. But the only shelter he had to offer was the palm of his hand. He started small: a plot, a well, a wall. A window for the wall and a plank on which to sit. Now look—he's an investment. Someday everyone will want a floorboard, rummage for the good Corningware. And when the children gather at his low walls, hoping to hear his voice one more time, singing Come here, by the riverside, he can echo their own pleading back to them.

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Ginger Ayla (she/her) is a writer and poet who lives on the Colorado-New Mexico border with her partner and their beloved troublemakers, Winnie, Olive, and Bug. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in PRISM International, Phoebe, Grist, Cleaver, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. She’s fueled by coffee, nature, and reality TV. You can find other writings on her Substack, Effing the Ineffable.