Elliot LeGrange
My first memory of my father isn’t sharing raw potatoes,
curled together on his waterbed as The X-Files stuttered
across his turn dial black-and-white television
in a house robbed hollow,
or how the maple trees screamed
that rare summer night he had off from the stain factory
when he taught me to float in my grandparents’ hot tub
on the altar of his hands, my eyes snaring stars.
It isn’t how I buried my fingertips in his six belly buttons
every time he shed a sweat-damp work shirt,
because the only way I knew how to say I missed you today
was by counting up those fresh scars of his cancer surgery.
Though I wish it were that, or the worm he passed to my
palm
and sliced gently in half with the blade of his shovel
so he could share the burden of a thing in pieces
that bleeds without dying, and I was grateful—
Or God, give me those midnights I unlaced his steel toes,
peeling off his socks to touch the pleated red skin of his
ankles,
as he thumbed the eyes of my teddy bear clean
with a tired You gotta look out for ’im, sweetheart—
Just rid me of what came before it all: the beer on his
breath,
my bare feet sticking to the vinyl tile of our kitchen floor
as he slumped his full weight into my preschool body,
sobbing
You’re the only thing that keeps me from killing myself,
and I cradled his head in my arms in the quiet realization
I wasn’t anything more than that.