Dale Cottingham
TO MY FATHER
America, its threads
of half breeds, multi-breeds, entwines—
tenement dwellers in Chicago
or sharecroppers
in west Arkansas
braiding
backroads amid thieves
and flimflams,
stitched into uneven fields
hardpan in summer
frozen in winter
wearing hard sermons
of lakes of fire
and damnation
like homespun
that adjured them
to subdue and multiply
where they bred large families
my father one, a mechanic,
who sits at our table telling
of his grandmother, Mary,
half Choctaw
whose parents were
force-migrated from Mississippi,
Mary, torn from her homeland,
who resisted the warp and weft
even refusing to ride in cars—
the hair on dad’s hands
worn off
by solvent
from washing car parts
but the twine of his life
could not be washed—
and neither can ours,
our family of librarians,
lawyers, engineers,
we are obscure
we are destined to be deprived
of a homeland we never knew
as August
burns
outside
These are
the clothes
we wear
No one
to take them off
no one to unweave the weave
RECOVERY WARD
We had February to handle.
That pullout couch? I never asked you
how it made it into the landscape or
what music you heard in your head
during the lulls between class and apartment.
In this careless way we let what happened happen.
You cut gin with Kool Ade.
We both rode on the sled.
Not good or bad, we bleached out the fabric
we’d woven between us.
I never saw you after that.
Now it’s All Saints Day and in Sienna
they’ve brought out relics of local saints.
Evening closes the day earlier. The yellowing trees
have a story too: a history
in leaves dying on their limbs.
It’s regret again, how the lunar year went all too fast,
watching that couple in the piazza,
then slipping off to bed, alone again, to sleep
and to my dreams that swirl,
still trying to recover, still feeling
the curve of the myth you lent.
Dale Cottingham has published poems and reviews of poetry collections in many journals. Dale is a Breadloafer and won the 2019 New Millennium Award for Poem of the Year. His debut collection is in circulation for a publisher. He lives in Edmond, Oklahoma.