The Collected Letters of My Daughter No Hi, Dad, w’sup? but a texted TTYL. This is the way she holds me off. Never privy to her late-night whereabouts, all I want is: When is she coming home? Instead she writes L8R, by which she means there’ll be a blue moon in the black sky before I find out. Then I make my plea: Come on. Not fair. I gotta know. but all I get is STBY, and indeed it sucks to be me, but WTF, this is all I’ve got, till I try TMIRLAGOITES, because she used to be such a curious child-and I do get a WDYM? I write: The moon is rising like a giant orange in the eastern sky – thinking how we used to like to look at it together as it faded to lemon the higher it got, then eggshell white no larger than a child’s thumb held back and forth to her eye in the black and blue of the early night. And she writes, WKEWL,OM, which means she’s not at all impressed, but I ask, OM? because I’m desperate for any letters she can spare for me. Old Man, she replies, full length, after making me wait, and then, a moment later, LMAO. I’m happy she’s happy, though it’s a shame an ass might come so easily off when I’d prefer hers intact, laughing, and right here next to me.
By Alan Walowitz. This poem was originally published in Glow Truth Serum Vol. 6 by Truth Serum Press. Alan is from Great Neck, NY, is a Contributing Editor at Verse-Virtual, an Online Community Journal of Poetry. His chapbook, Exactly Like Love, comes from Osedax Press. The full-length, The Story of the Milkman and Other Poems, is available from Truth Serum Press. Forthcoming from Arroyo Seco Press is the chapbook In the Muddle of the Night, written trans-continentally with Betsy Mars.
12
Photograph Fai Rose find her on Instagram.
