Your father wears the day / as a shirt with soot-spider
stains on his spine: / sweat-soaked, stuck like plastic wrap
to calloused skin / your ears peering through distilled
quiet / & retinas carving slivers of his back / as he strips
the scent of coal / & slips ashes onto the terrace / the gray
like a rotting disease / on the cloth of daylight’s rind /
clutched between his knuckles / as he wrings out the last
of toil / twists droplets in circadian rhythms recoiling /
on the railing top — beaded dew on a nyctinastic bulb.
Your father watches wet salt absorb / white beams &
repay him in paltry moons / pearled sweet on splintered
wood / an aftertaste like smoke / reclaimed from the
stacks, torridity made warm / as your mother’s ember
lips / fleeting in the flickering crimson of his lighter.
