ISSUE: Summer 2021
Digging in dregs of trash
to find the bird my father needed
to get well, I tore a vanishing
line across the length of my palm.
My hand emerged slowly,
crown of pulp, pulsing. My
excommunicated ex-Navy father:
Come here, boy (he called me
boy though I was a girl because
he wanted a boy and I was a girl). He
pressed his blackened finger
into the head of the valley. Then
dispensed some trauma he’d picked
up in Vietnam about dead bodies not
being able to bleed and pain
being the only true way to know you
alive. How pleasure persuades
belief in a heaven that doesn’t
exist for people like us and how he could
prove God was fiction and Satan
the realest motherfucka ever
made: Look around. He lifted
his index, the one staunching
the flow, to his lip. Sampled my blood.
I let out something—
more moan than cry—too
shocked for much else when he
grabbed the back of my neck, pulled
me close to teach his only lesson worth
remembering: Cry, Boy,
look that honest wound in the eye
and you betta let this bitch-ass
world see what she did to you.
