I Want Your Wingless Body, Your Solid Bones

The rest is feathers and ash

             

            

                                                                                  

I. Void

My father is not a swan. His bones are not hollow inside his flesh. The spaces between the phalanges of his feet are not spanned by delicate black webbing.

My father has never once trumpeted.

My father has no air sacs on his lungs. The doctors would have seen these when they cut through his not-hollow breastbone to expose and unblock his heart. The idea is, use an open artery to make a new pathway. The conclusion is, close the original wound.

My father’s chest was pried open in Florida, who knows how many curves of the river from Minnesota, where I stood with the phone in my hand as he lay on the table. Minnesota, where my father was born and my mother was born and I was born with weak lungs and a spine that grew crooked toward the window.

Florida is far from the saltless amniotic waves of Lake Superior, far from the sulfur and stench and seduction of this river that flows th…