After I Watch Reruns of "Father Knows Best"
After, with My Sister
Lost in Space: Astral Artist
Lost in Space: The Ghost
After I Watch Reruns of "Father Knows Best"
I walk into a room I’ve walked into before—
a swank TV room, huge flat screen, surround sound,
stocked bar—I sit down on a sectional I’ve sat on before.
I search for my hands I’ve searched for before
and realize what I realized before I walked up to the TV
turned on YouTube’s Three Hours of Aquarium Fish
and looked for my father I’ve looked for before—
my face in the sea screen, alone, drowning.
We walk and walk and do not
talk about our father.
Where the river widens, splits around an island,
the currents are strong—
everything rushing away from us.
Years ago visiting Gettysburg
when we came upon that bronze
Union General on horseback
looking over his battlefields
where you can still find buckles,
brass buttons, bullets, where it’s illegal to take,
we searched for answers—any news of the dead.
Now, we don’t open our mouths—
the wind would hurt our teeth.
It does not compute—Dr. Zachary Smith
Stars on earth are famous humans, starfish, star fruit, good girl gold stars and the stars I learned to draw without lifting pen from paper—one continuous line—the way my father taught me. How I still draw them. He taught me one joke: What’s black and white and red (read) all over? He taught me falling stars aren’t stars but tiny cosmic rocks burning up as they hit our atmosphere. Stick figures. Lollipop trees. Lopsided stars. This isn’t a fraction of who he was on earth. How do you draw a life?
Don't leave me alone. Wait for me! —John Robinson
I ran into my father’s ghost at the supermarket fish display. Squid + colossal shrimp + cherrystones = his famous space paella. I try not to shop with him in my head. Everyday we have these little battles going on inside us. Soak clams in cornmeal water. Remove squid beak. Generous pinch of saffron. Jasmine rice. What we want to do, and what we need to do, sometimes they can be very different things. You must scorch the planet in a cast iron skillet and eat the burnt underside like a communal offering. I will hate you for not loving me enough to try harder. Even the clams I bought are still breathing. They spit stars in my face when I open the fridge.
Cindy Veach is the author of Her Kind (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the 2022 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal, Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read,’ and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poet Lore and Salamander among others. Cindy is the recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and the Samuel Allen Washington Prize. She is co-poetry editor of MER (Mom Egg Review). www.cindyveach.com
