I saw my father once, not as himself but as
the wood grain of the kitchen table,
how it curled under time’s hot breath,
the way his laughter settled into grooves
that held our Sunday dinners and stories,
told and retold until memory held the shape
of forgotten chairs we sat in.

My mother became the garden fence,
paint peeling and leaning—she kept
the world from us with crooked grace.
Every summer, she let us paint her white again,
her posts rooted where we played games
no one remembered starting.
We grew tall, like sunflowers leaning on her shadow.

It all comes back on an ordinary Wednesday,
when I see my brother’s old baseball cap
crumpled in the hall closet,
the one he threw in anger,
his voice echoing still in that small space.
How we swore we’d never grow apart,
made promises as easy as crickets singing at dusk,
then left them behind like so many lost gloves.

I think of roads I’ve driven since,
where the trees lean in, whispering stories of sap and leaves,
always reaching, never arriving.
Maybe you felt that too, some nameless longing
at the edge of a place you never meant to stay.
Maybe it was something more like standing
in an open field, the wind unraveling everything
you thought you could hold.

And even now, I wonder if love
has anything to do with keeping.
If instead, it’s the way you remember the creak
of the back door at midnight,
how it didn’t close, not quite,
how it let the night breathe
with everything we weren’t saying,
everything we’ve yet to learn.

About the author:

Part of our Winter 2025 Issue. New stories, poems, and essays now through February 2025.

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