To My Father / For His Other Family

(After Ocean Vuong)

Steve Merino

Dad, don’t be afraid.

We are a people of lakes & spinning rivers.

We know how to hold what won’t speak.

 

Look, our eyes

have seen different scars, but

 

I still move like the ghosts

haunting

what we are afraid to say.

 

No, we don’t have a common language.

Someday, perhaps, we will find it

searching in mom’s garden, lodged in some scrapyard muffler.

 

Once, before you met my mother,

you were in love.

 

Had a whole family before ours where you must

have enjoyed happy days

& now as if something of only dream,

completely forgotten.

 

Ok, I don’t want to believe what I come from:

you left

 

& I’m trying not to live in your mistakes, but

 

something inside me was always broken.

 

Do you understand? You cried when your mother died

but not theirs. Didn’t attend the funeral.

 

How I never want to feel so much

ambivalence and yet I already do.

 

I close my eyes and think of my half-brother

waiting for you to call on his birthday. Close

my eyes & keep hearing revolving doors.

 

From you, I learned to praise the absence of being there,

the weight of silence in a throat.

From them,

I learned to praise the art of holding on.

 

If you seek forgiveness, I

am not the place to start. I have my own to seek.

 

Where to begin?

This river only ever

 

keeps going. How it is always November in

my wrists

 

& you: every road out of town.

 

Quick. Have these constellations changed

since you last taught their stories?

 

Surely not, but the riding mower

sounds like it could use

more oil.

 

This poem is my way of saying I recognize

we are the same & you

don’t have to do this alone.

Maybe you will never be forgiven.

 

Maybe I

won’t either. If you imagine how days

 

keep running until they don’t, maybe

try running too. Wounds can be

another way of cleansing.

 
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Steve is a poet and essayist living in Saint Paul, MN where he is a candidate in Hamline University's MFA program and a poetry editor for Red Bird Chapbooks.