My father loves in a practical way
My father loves the way only an ex-soldier can.
He loves with things handy and familiar.
Like steel or fist.
My father is practical.
The way his belts love my behind.
The way his knuckles love my cheek.
His love is like the scars on his thigh.
Scars, the memory of six bullets.
My father walks with a limp
from wrestling with death
and breaking its jaw.
He had nursed his limp
long before I stumbled into the world.
Like an accident.
My birth was accidental.
My father jokes only in the evenings
before his eyes
turn bloodshot
from the images of mashed bodies,
houses charred and tottering.
There are evenings I am a crab in a corner,
scuttling hushed in the shadows.
But my father often pins me down
by his side on the deck.
Gin in hand, he inspects motes,
omens stalking the air,
and reminds me of vultures ripping down
the throat of a dream,
the dream of a nation
once heady from freedom.
He had watched his father’s body,
smashed beneath a boulder,
gush like a burst pipe.
He had heard his mother gasp his name,
just when he had managed to haul her,
tangled and leaking,
to what was left of the clinic.
My father never forgets
the riotous mood of sirens,
scampering and ducking in every direction,
while he had reached for a limb
and trekked for two miles or so,
uncowed by screams and smoke,
searching for its missing owner
until a woman in rags
hopped out of the bush
and screamed at him
to let go of the limb.
There is nothing as beautiful as palm trees
flailing in a festival of fires.
My father always ends his stories
on this image, smacks his lips,
and shoves his tumbler in my face,
his gestures, always martial.
Sip up, son. The world is already drunk.
There is no love more practical than father and son sipping gin
On the deck, my father traces the scars on his thigh,
a mine of memories,
seared out of love and daring,
as I pucker my lips and sip his gin,
wary, like a cat,
the vanishing cat
in my mother’s lullaby.
Perhaps this is what love is—
There is no love more practical
than father and son
sipping gin in the backyard.
The gin is fire on my tongue.
The gin is raw honey in my throat.
One evening, my father was scoffing
at the gaudy parade
of soldiers flaunting rifles on TV,
I shunned the tumbler,
swigged from the bottle,
and found my eleven-year-old body
dancing
like a palm tree
on fire.
Pink flames tickled me
from head to toe.
I danced,
my belly flaming pink,
my arms barely mine,
my legs jelly fish all over the floor,
I danced until I fell,
a flamingo,
in front of my father,
giggling.
I think my father saw that I was full of feathers and light.
He saw his gin was two fingers short.
Instead of whipping out his belt,
as he was wont to,
he gave a laugh
that whizzed my mother
out of the kitchen.
My mother looked at my father. Looked at me,
as if I was double,
as if I was disjointed,
as if I was disappearing.
Even as lakes swam across my eyes,
I could tell
she feared that the war
was happening again
in my father’s head.
But my father, a bull at rest,
unleashed,
as would a magician,
a gap-toothed grin and said,
What we love often consumes us.
