man
a man needs a maid
curled up between my now dead father (at 68)
+bro (at 72) but for a virulent cancer one would
have expected my brother to live well into his 90’s
long livers on our mother’s side but his liver a
metastatic miasma just recently
in this photo circa 1973 handsome brother in a
straw cowboy hat beads around his neck ‘stache
+hair down to there a football hero hippie just
returned from nassau father in his 50’s football
glory days return in dreams on freezing suburban
nights when arteries whisper dark songs
but this day jazz plays daddy smokes a cigar +
14 yr. old girl jewfro in a can atop her head curled
comfortably between her first 2 men both cocky
charismatics but in different ways both old world
patriarchs in the same way re: a woman’s place
what respect she wrested rested upon her spunk
brains +unwavering belief that she was one of them
the one who walked slowly toward their deathbeds
encouraging them to be unafraid
a fearlessness she learned in the arena mother’s
mastectomy when she was 17 and the steely will of
real men alchemically seeping into veins
__
FALL 2018
songanddancegirl 