Punch
It was a game we’d play
with our father. His abs
like louvered shutters
beneath his black shirt.
We’d line up and take
turns punching him
in the stomach.
He would grunt, once,
as if lifting something
heavy off a floor,
then smile. Amazed
at how little he felt,
we’d laugh when
each of us failed
to break him.
When I hold my son
it is like holding
my father as a boy.
No, not as a boy,
but my father
the size of a boy.
When my father lays
his head on my chest
it is like opening
a window at night.
You can’t see out
but you can feel
the cold air coming in.
Copyright © 2026 by James Ciano. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 27, 2026, by the Academy of American Poets.
“I held on to the memory that opens this poem for a long time, and tried it out once before in an earlier poem that ultimately didn’t work. But as I’ve become a father to a son, the specter of my own father has cast a suddenly larger shadow. Writing this poem now, aware of fatherhood as a forward (and backward) facing act, I was surprised to find that it was my own father laying his head upon my chest, an act of repair, a tenderness not possible in life, but made possible by the world of the poem.”
—James Ciano
James Ciano
