September

Now the earth begins to tilt, plunging us

into the deep. The sun loses its fight to stay

above the skyline just a bit sooner

every night, and the velvety darkness

swallows the sky. Tectonic plates shift,

and days converge, and time gets caught

between the now and the before.

There is a sadness in the air, fighting

between the chill and the last shreds of warmth.

Dragonflies glide, holding onto the last

bit of their lives, trees reach towards each other

with their thin fingers, the dregs of summer

hang on by desperate threads, tendrils of

memories, wishes drift past silent windows,

glass eyes glowing golden outward.

And you are always like this, grasping for

a moment as it slips away from you,

wishing nothing would ever change, but

everything crumbles; hopes turn to sparks

in the bonfires, winking out before they

reach the stars, blowing away like ash in

the wind. Every year that has been,

and will be, is also this one, and you

are seventeen and twenty and twenty-seven

all at the same time, and in the ephemeris

of your life, this is the true end of the year.

Sins of my father

2021

I’m running blindly out of the house and up the hill, tears streaming down my face. I don’t care if the sharp prickles from the Chinese chestnut tree puncture my bare feet. I don’t care that I’m still in pajamas. I know in a minute someone will come to find me, but I don’t want to be found. 

I’m slamming the door, sobbing, crying into the bosom of a woman I barely know. My vision is red. The sun is hot. I tell her I don’t need anything, but I sit with my knees pressed in the grass for a long time afterwards. 

I’m huddled in a chair under the insufficient shelter of the awning, because there's nowhere else to go. The rain drips off the roof. Tears drip off my chin. And I wish I was anywhere but there. 

And each of these times, the only thing in my mind is the terrible thought, I hate him, I hate him, and I hate myself for it. 

My mother says it is the plethora of prescription drugs. The sinister cancer that’s growing in my father’s head. That is the reason for the shouting, the lashing out, the making us flee the dinner table as he curses at our backs. 

     I try my hardest to believe her. 

     I cannot. 

2007

I was almost four when my brother was born, and I had never been away from my mother for this long. I couldn’t stop my sobs as my father drove home from the hospital after seeing her, the realization sinking in that she wasn’t coming with us. That night she called to say my prayers over the phone, but hearing her voice only made it worse for me. I chokingly tried to repeat my verses after her, but it was no use. My father, fed up with my crying, grabbed the phone, yelled something into it, and hung up. He did not try to comfort me. He shouted instead. 

2009

“Honey, your voice is drowning me out. I can’t hear myself sing.” As sweetly as she could.

    “Sing it by yourself then! Finish it!” he shouted at her. 

     I burst into tears. 

     My mother forced her way through the rest of the psalm while I shook and hiccuped on the couch beside her, and she tried to help me sing along, and my father glowered ominously into his psalm book to make sure she finished it. 

2011

I couldn’t help but hear as my parents argued for what seemed like hours. In the car, in the kitchen, in the hall. Why did they do it when we were around? Did they think we were too young to care? I knew it had to do with my father’s job, but I couldn’t understand why they were arguing with each other. I heard when he yelled at her after she made a suggestion, and her crying in their bedroom. I gave her my handkerchiefs and sat on their bed with her, not knowing the right way to comfort at seven years old. 

2013

He called my mother a bad word. She hadn’t done anything to deserve it. Then we had to sit and watch a movie on the couch in silence, while indignation too large for me smoldered in my child’s heart. 

2015

My brothers and sister and I waited eagerly for our father to bring home pizza one evening. When he finally arrived, we sat down at the table excitedly and uncovered the boxes. 

     “Don’t gorge yourselves,” he told us harshly. “There’s a line between hunger and gluttony.” 

     We ate our pizza with silent glances at one another, all happiness faded. 

 There’s a line between hunger and gluttony. 

But on Thursdays, the day before shopping day, a heel of bread and half a bag of baby carrots would be the only things that remained in the refrigerator, and I would eat expired raisins out of a sticky container to curb the hunger before bed. 

2019

His screamed words echoed in my mind for a long time after they faded from the air. Cuts at my brothers, my sister, my mother. On rare occasions, me. At some point in my teenagehood the burning in my chest turned from fear to rage. It turned from hiding to standing my ground and shooting words back. It turned to inward hatred and anger eating me up. 

     My mother chastised me for not respecting him. How could I, when I saw him for what he was? It wasn’t just what he did, it was what he didn’t do. 

Fifteen years old, I found a young deer by the side of the road with both of its back legs broken by a car. It couldn’t run. It could only flail pitifully. I watched it with my jaw clenched. I knew from movies that the humane thing to do was to put it out of its misery. I knew my father owned a gun. But I should have known he wouldn’t help me. 

     “The coyotes will take care of it,” he said when I told him, and turned a deaf ear to me. 

     My mother called a neighbor and told him about the deer. About an hour later, I heard the unmistakable crack of a gun from my yard. 

     That was when I realized I couldn’t depend on my father. 

2020

I watched jealously while my father fawned over a curly-haired, blue-eyed little girl who he barely even knew, the daughter of my mother’s friend. “She looks like a fairy,” he said. Meanwhile, it was a struggle to get him to pay any attention to his own children that didn't stem from anger. I thought I was wrong to be envious of this. Something told me I shouldn’t have had to be. 

I returned home after one of the only times I left my house in 2020, to go to my best friend’s 18th birthday party. I had slept over. When I got home, I was expecting something from my father, a greeting, a hello, a “Nice to see you.” 

     I received nothing. Nothing but an apathetic presence, like always, no words. I felt stupid for expecting something different. That was when this appalling thought began to fester in my mind.

 He may be my father, but he’s not my dad. 

2021

All these things I remember when he screams at us, regardless of the tumor in his head. And no, I don’t believe my mother. This feels too familiar. I’ve seen enough to know that this is him, this has always been him. But now, next to the anger festering in my heart, there is something even worse. 

     Guilt. 

“We’re gonna move into the new house, and it’s gonna be destroyed with crap!” I burst out before fleeing the apartment into a drizzle of rain. 

     I’m tired, tired of it all, tired of chemo and contamination, steroids and puffy limbs, and excrement all day long, and the same shows over and over on the TV. Is that an excuse for what I said? What I didn’t say? But he was sick, so I was the bad guy, after he had been for so long. 

2022

Nights, dark and painful. I skulk upstairs, around corners. I do my best to never see my fading father. My mother says I’ll regret it. She says I should try while I still have time. But I can’t make myself. I can’t make myself forget the years. The countless hurts. I know how selfish that is. It doesn’t matter. 

     Others see how I avoid him. They think they can tell me what I should do. But nothing can make me break down that wall. They don’t know the things I remember. Those last days, my only wish was one I kept a secret. 

I wish he would just die. Just die.

I just wanted it to be over. Who could blame me for that? I did. The guilt of it ate me up. But when he was gone, beneath the strange and natural grief, there was the relief of a tension held for so long. A breath finally released. 

2023 

And a year later, I wake from frequent bad dreams of him, in a safe bed in a bright room, in a world he no longer lives in, and feel relief, and guilt because of it.