WINNER
Spear Side (Patrilineality) Poem by Chelsea Whitton
Your lopsided father stuck the loose stars to your sky one summer. Even now they glow up there, as if, like you, they are still dumbstruck by the memory of his hulking grace. With one foot on the bed, one on the chest of drawers, his finger pressed each phosphorescent shard into eternity, too high for anyone to tear them down. It should have busted his ass to do a thing like that. It did —that kind of thing—eventually. >>> “That kind of thing, eventually, will wear a man’s skin thin,” says mine. His skin is thin, and mottled from five decades in the sun, on a vast green field that only winks at abundance; does not, in fact, yield anything up, save little flags from holes, the occasional sky-borne alien egg. True enough, he’s burned his skin to paper for this game. But he does not, this time, for once, mean golf. He means grief. That kind of thing. He means leaving a child in the ground. All fathers suffer. >>> In the ground, all fathers suffer the fate of the warrior. In life, it’s a sky of tin gods. Each one’s a private lodestar, lost to all but us.
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