fathers
Four Poems
that smoke; detail of shears; detail of matches; i go to a hole in the wall carribean restaurant because their beans taste like my father’s beans...
Modern Nature
The bee pooped on a rug. He turned around to inspect it. He had thoughts about death. He always did when faced with his own waste.
Middle Ages
He promised to live and die in the Panhandle, and he kept his word...
Transience
I always know where I’m going. Except when I don’t. When I’m in New York City I’m neither a local nor a tourist. I’m not the sidewalk nor the person walking on it—I am the seam connecting the two tiles together, unnoticed but essential to stability. I’ve been here enough times to have exhausted all the usual tourist spots: to my dismay Madame Tussauds wax figures haven’t aged at all since I visited them as a kid, the same ferries that take people out to the oxidized Statue of Liberty are still running, and I’ve watched as Ground Zero has been turned into a tourist destination. Despite all of that, I still end up on the uptown train when I should be going downtown more times than I’d like to admit...
Making It Big
When celebrities overdose, I blame my dad... I was restarting college after moving back to Florida. A couple of years before I had escaped north to Atlanta, but the wet heat sucked me back down. That’s what my boyfriend and I kept saying about Florida, our excuse to move back. It’s like a black hole or a succubus or an implosion. It doesn’t matter how fast you move or how far, it’ll suck you back down and keep sucking until your over-tanned skin pinches up between your boobs and your shoulders slope forward and you’re dragging your arms like a dried out mummy.
A Partial Profile of Nick Flynn with Some Self-Indulgent Detours
My father, who passed away a couple years ago, smuggled pot, cocaine, and allegedly a boatload of Cuban defectors in the mid-80s.