ISSUE 6
Joshua McKinney
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Dream #37
My father and I sit in shade
facing each other, our backs
against the trunks of large, smooth-
barked fruit trees. Beyond him,
a green field frosted with
blossoms, and in the long silences
bees drone over the clover.
I have not seen nor spoken
to my father in forty years.
After so much time, his reasons
for leaving seem irrelevant. What good
would come from accusation?
I have broken promises myself,
and I have come to understand
the inevitability of parting. I tell him
my mother has remarried and
is doing well, that my kids are
grown now and on their own.
“But are they ever, really?” he says.
I pick up a fist-sized windfall fruit,
polish it on my thigh, take a bite.
It has no taste. My father winces.
He looks terrible, and I must look
pretty bad myself. The bees have grown
louder; the air seems to vibrate
with their humming. I know
the question my father wants to ask,
but before he can ask it, a woman
screams, then appears
in full flight, pursued by three pitbulls,
and passes, in a stumbling run, over
a distant hill. “Is it always like this?”
I ask. My father cannot answer.
The tree he leans against reaches
two limbs down and tears open
the stapled suture stretching from
his throat to his naval. A bushel of
fruit spills from his chest cavity, scatters
across the grass like broken
billiard balls. Famished, I clutch at one,
but my mouth is full of bees.
They have found the hole
at the back of my head, and entering there
have built a comb in my skull.
I have not seen nor spoken to my father
in forty years. I cannot speak to him
now. I cannot even see him
for the honey oozing from my eyes.
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Joshua McKinney’s most recent book of poetry is Small Sillion (Parlor Press, 2019). His work has appeared in such journals as Boulevard, Denver Quarterly, Kenyon Review, New American Writing, and many others. He is the recipient of The Dorothy Brunsman Poetry Prize, The Dickinson Prize, The Pavement Saw Chapbook Prize, and a Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Writing. He is co-editor of the online ecopoetics zine, Clade Song.