For Me
“Can you pick good numbers for the plate? “For my daughter,” my father tells the DMV woman. She does not hear him as she nibbles on the side of her cheek, hour 6.5 of an 8 hour workday, and picks a sequence, the first number repeated. Mnemonic devices write themselves if you let them. My father wrings his hands, his thin-lipped smile a disarming placeholder. He keeps it shut so that the teeth will stop falling from his mouth like in the nightmares we flail around to wake from. The regrets dissolve his entrails but he who conquers the mind conquers all, he insists “For my daughter,” my father reminds himself on the four hundredth day of his hunger strike. “For my daughter, my father sings into the ears of our deaf dog whom I loved and who was buried in the backyard two years before she died. My father runs into the forest when his past finishes eating him at dusk. My father whittles his body into the ether. “For my daughter,” my father says as he dumps eggshells and the wretched, the smelly, into the compost behind our house. My father etches rhymes and Sunday words, the thesaurus kind, onto my rib cage bones that stretch with fabricated heaves but which never break, and he does it for me.
aleX says, tenor sax for bullfrog funk and Lisa Simpson solos.
In our dream band, on tenor sax:
aleX (she/hers) studies physics or physiognomy or phylogeny, she forgets, but she writes and doodles in both her busy and free time. Her poetry and other works are forthcoming in her apartment communal newsletters, rogue zines, and The Pitt Grill Quarterly, the literary magazine she and her best friend started.
Ran Off With the Star Bassoon 