Matthew Kirshman
Fatherhood I can feel my father in my womb. How I have starved for his limbs, his hands, his voice to be reborn in me. Now I know the taste of fatherhood. At first, he was but a shadow below the waters of my womb; and then, piecemeal, he began to surface, the bits of him bobbing up in the stream of my senses. It is as if his life has lain latent in my body, holding some elemental meaning for me. Last night he came to me, in the likeness of a snapshot of him standing by his own father. It’s strange to see the two posed together at such a late date. Some submerged tension flows between them, splits them apart. The building in the background is probably the hospital, where his parents have come to visit. My grandfather looks a bearish man, with the same hesitant smile I can picture him wearing when he first came to this country. My father is also stocky; but that is from the medication he was taking. And despite his groggy grin, I can tell he’s self-conscious and uncomfortable, like someone naked. My father was colossal in my dream. He had something pressing to tell. And though I can’t recall the words, I am left with a gut feeling, the current of his voice pulsing through me. I can see myself in him, as if his photo were a double-exposure. Standing on the steps of that brick building belongs to my own set of memories, so fully have I absorbed my father’s form. There is such sense in his image that a separate past seems to have been mapped out for me.
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