Page 31 - Vol. V #6

Portrait of Your Father, Regarding the Crocodile
You stitch together the pieces of a story from everyone but your father: how he fled from the mouth
How he spent the first fourteen years of his life with a machete in his hand, bowed his back under three hundred
How: a job isn’t nothing but selling your time
for someone else’s money, and money is the blood
How: everybody got three hundred-dollar-problems, but don’t nobody got three hundred years
How none of us wants to live somebody else’s dream.
By the time you learn of the crocodile inside your father’s stomach, you’re no longer living under his roof, waiting—
of a crocodile.
years of sugarcane.
How the history of sugarcane is the history of the machete is the history of Cuba is the
history of sweat and strangle
and choke.
The few words he can muster, after two decades, he spits forth like old bones from the throat
of a Riverdog god.
of someone else’s dream.
to give you back.
praying —for him to rise once more, for air.
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McCoy earned his undergraduate degree in Theater Arts from Clark University, where he got his start as a writer and performer of slam poetry. His work can be found in Platypus Press, Bottlecap Press, and Sixfold.