Poem for my daughters on their 14th birthday
The wires in your mouths
set their twisted dates
for removal, timed
to the vaccines sprinkled
like confetti upon the city
in amen anticipation
of summer bustle.
Will you open
your mouths around town?
Will you glide
your unpackaged bodies under bridges
on bikes and streetcars,
under the gazes of passersby?
Will you slam
the door on the porch,
on your bedroom,
on the dollhouse
in the basement?
I should stretch
my mouth to swallow
you whole, as a rorqual’s
cousin swallows krill,
pat my belly in the way
that there preggers person at the Bloor
Street fruitmarket pats
the tender melony bulge
between the unzipped hemmed edges
of her taut overcoat,
studying the ripe berries under the awning,
absentmindedly content.
The only strength left
I am grown and he is dying.
My father’s hands still palm
the words of my old dreams
the way a quiet man reassures
a son with a press of palm.
Measure the language of their span
in miles of road and work.
His shoulders whittled down
to taxidermy, exhumed
by the greedy cells in lungs and bones.
The greedy cells filched his chest,
his biceps, hoarded the mass
for themselves. Greedy cells found liver,
brain, spleen, scoured it all near to clean.
What silt of strength is the look
those hands press into you
from across the room.
A time capsule folded finger over
finger. Those lap-bound hands
swaddle childhood.
Slunk back in that last plush chair,
mouth agape in a nap,
the oxygen machine pumps
its metronome of gasps,
tubing running a long tangled glissando
across the glossed oak floorboards,
thick as the veins down the backs
of my father’s hands that still
hold you in their sight, mortally
weighty and mortally warm.
Artwork Courtesy of our featured Artist Hassan Zahreddine
