I’m fourteen and the smell of singed hair circles me like the halo of a pre-Renaissance Madonna. Loss already on my face. A summer crush holds out his fingers
Picture if you will Tony Hoagland and me, he in his Donkey Gospel hat and me wearing my Hustle ring, in his car patched with silver duct tape and sagging passenger mirrors discussing vehicles as metaphors
There is, in a nearby field, a retired show horse living out whatever days it can win, a white horse speckled with brown flecks. Its limp mane welcomes your hand. On its face,
After your father gets lost for the third time, you get angry because he won’t answer his phone. Part of me wants him to stay lost. God, what has stolen my generosity?
I dreamed of it again, my dad’s body lost to us again but finally found again, we set him in Dickinson’s coffin, wooden, painted white, where had his body been all these years, things felt strange,
We were quick to tell each other what we wanted. I said, I want to be cremated and then I want my ashes to be tossed in the Pacific and the Atlantic. He said I was greedy for wanting both coasts, but he’d do it.
After the pigs and lambs and rabbits were sold off at auction they bought a 30 dollar goat and named it Snowflake Brownie and then a second one called Cookie Dough the third Brandon but the names melded into dubbing them the Healing Goats...
