At the Champion Avenue Low-Income Senior & Child Care Services Center

When I told them it must be like dropping your kid            

off at school their first day, all my parent friends

nodded and smiled uncomfortably, meaning              

what would I know. I won’t be taking solace                 

in the many firsts ahead. Here among the gray,

spotted and brown heads of the seniors,

their soft flesh and angles, their obedience as they

sit as uprightly as they are able at white, parallel

tables, nobody cries, and very few speak.                 

When I seat dad beside her, one senior tells me

she’s ninety-four, presenting one hand, four

fingers in the air, just as she might have ninety

years ago with a stranger like me, now long gone.



                       Dad never liked me to talk:

Lower your voice, he’d say. If I was louder:

Put on your boxing gloves. Or: You’ll catch

more flies with honey than vinegar, as if some day

I’d need the flies. I stopped talking, started writing

instead. I work full-time and dad wants to die,

so I dropped him at the Champion Avenue

Low-income Senior & Child Care Services Center,

a newish building, municipal and nondescript,

in a neighborhood that’s been razed and rebuilt so often

it’s got no discernible character left. There was bingo,

men playing poker in a corner. Red sauce and cheese

on white bread pizza for lunch. Dad, a big talker,

was an instant hit, but refused to return. What

is the name of that animal, someone asked me.

Where is Philip, asked someone else, over and over.

As if firsts and lasts were one and the same.