Poetry Reading: DISSOLUTION OF MY FATHER, by Jesse Darnay

Performed by Val Cole

POEM:

Inpatient Hospice

You inhabit me; you narrow to flanks.
Your spineless nerves sear my ventricles.
The creative will will snap your cheekbone—
hush, soil, remains.
Look at the blank between us
squeezing my shoulders.

I breathed through your infamy
at graduation,
mingled, carried my orphaned part,
discarded in a scattering
of peers.

Your socked feet shake now,
betray what you outran:
weakness.
Face compressed to grooves, you
strain to unriddle me.
Your neck, the bruises,
an ardor of decomposition.

You mouth Yoplait,
stilled by the TV’s shifting colors
where an Olympian spirals.
A nurse checks the infusion.

I can’t piece
the fragments
we are
to make you solid
and keep me safe.
You cut my lyric free
of source.