“I’m angry that I forgot what he sounds like, that I can’t remember the calluses his hands felt like tousling my hair, and even something as minor as not recalling what he really smelt like. Instead, all of these feelings are replaced by pictures and recordings and musty old clothes in a closet we never look in.”
– Riley Duane Whitson,
the biggest big brother,
five years after.
In case you can’t see anything anymore.1
TO MY FATHER
I have recently divined that I’ve lived fourteen years
with you around my neck & there was only seven
when you could dance with me. Now you’re piggy-
backing on a platinum chain. Now I have ‘charisma’2
tattooed on my collarbone. & I think that means you’re
in my blood-stream. More than half my life I have
been avoiding careful people with gentle questions –
‘what do your parents do?’ my mom picks at her skin &
doesn’t want to be judged ‘oh, and your dad?’ thanks,
he’s dead – mouths open like bubblegum pop. People
tell me they’re sorry a lot. Sorry is a mask. I’ll dig
sorry a grave you never had. It should be far away
from you & from me – the opposite of free is a
land-lock. In my speech-prose, I replace every sorry
with a salmonberry-chuckle. A friend once told me my grieving was
crooked. I showed them my necklace & I laughed as
I said you were dead. He thought my exultance was
a puzzle piece with the wrong kind of corners. But
I know that you would like it, dad. They tell me you
were a funnyguy3, but I only remember how your
sweaters were wrought with coho-scales & your hugs
polished my toe-head pigtails with a saline-beard. I
was coronated Alaskan when you let me cut humpy
heads off bendy bodies on teal kitchen counters. Did
you know that I never eat fish & maybe it’s because
I don’t want to if you can’t. I wonder if you snickered when
I wore pink to the funeral. I was a chrysanthemum
& I still haven’t cried. I want you to see through my
little-miss-lost-eyes, cloudy-aged clothes & a closet I have
never dared to peek in, see my sisters4 become
un-daughtered, coronate into like-mothers to our own mother as she
shattered: mama, a glass vase full of glass fingers that
pick-up glass pebbles, & I remember once seeing my
mom’s pearl nails pick at my sisters’ bedazzled jeans
on a starch-white pile of laundry & she was in fetal
position, back to the womb & I don’t know how my sister
could touch her. Whenever I do all I feel is a frosty alarm
& it hacks me every time, I love her but why. do you think.
I can’t touch her. anymore? In truth, I’m always hiding my
angry, a steel-wool clump in the spaces between my
organs, & no one knows how pissed I am at you & at how
I still. haven’t cried. I don’t know. why you. had to leave
because now we’re fist-fight teeth holding on to iron-
soaked gums. ‘It’s better to be held than holding on’
so please, if you can reach me here,
my hand is wide-open.
