Page 33 - Vol V. #8
P. 33
The Blessing
Past master of phrases,
my father sits still and dumb.
Not one word has come.
Furious, I shake his hunched shoulders to loosen the last words,
stuck in his head like dead bees clogged in a honey hive, shattered
by the wayward club of a boy, for sport.
My father floats in a white hospital gown, his head barely surfacing,
a buoy anchored off shore.
And I am waiting for him to hail me,
to raise an arm and, shouting, drown.
Baird’s work has been published in The Paris Review, Western Humanities Review, The Southern Review, The Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, The South Dakota Review, The Quarterly, and The Recorder, among others. Her work has been included in The Paris Review’s 50th Anniversary Anthology and several more recent anthologies. Her book, In Advance Of All Parting, won the White Pine Press national poetry competition and was published by White Pine Press in 2009. In September of 2016, her second full-length collection of poems, The Solace of Islands, was pub- lished by BlazeVOX Press.
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