Blood History

The things that abandon you get remembered different.

As precise as the English language can be, with words

like penultimate and perseverate, there is not a combination

of sounds that describe only that leaving. Once,

drinking & smoking with buddies, a friend asked if

I’d longed for a father. Had he said wanted, I would have

dismissed him in the way that youngins dismiss it all:

a shrug, sarcasm, a jab to the stomach, laughter.

But he said longing. & in a different place, I might

have wept. Said, once, my father lived with us & then he

didn’t & it fucked me up so much I never thought about

his leaving until I held my own son in my arms & only

now speak on it. A man who drank Boone’s Farm & Mad

Dog like water once told me & some friends that there is no

word for father where he comes from, not like we know it.

There, the word father is the same as the word for listen.

The blunts we passed around let us forget our

tongues. Not that much though. But what if the old

head knew something? & if you have no father, you can’t

hear straight. Years later, another friend wondered why

I named my son after my father. You know, that’s a thing

turn your life to a prayer that no dead man gonna answer.