In 1906 Horatio Applewood watched a white man slip a Belgian Browning, a five-shot rifle, into his father’s hand as barter for a rowboat he had built from scratch.
A is for almost, arriving, my father’s death. / B is for bear, which he does and does not do. / C is for care and critics and leaving them to their caskets.
One day, I drove the hundred miles east to visit T at Ironwood and was denied visitation. The clerk told me there was no record of my request. Never mind that I had been visiting my son there every Saturday for five years.
Kwasi woke up somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean. What time was it? He looked out the window for a sign of land but there was only blackness and wisps of gray. The boy in the aisle seat who had fallen asleep on his shoulder woke up and looked blankly at him. He looked like he could have been Kwasi’s son. They had the same high cheekbones, the same sleepy, almond-shaped eyes. The boy’s head weighed on him like a great stone, but in the moment, Kwasi felt thankful for it. “It’s okay,” he said. “Go back to sleep.”
Picture if you will Tony Hoagland and me, he in his Donkey Gospel hat and me wearing my Hustle ring, in his car patched with silver duct tape and sagging passenger mirrors discussing vehicles as metaphors
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