AN OPEN LETTER TO JOSEPH PETER NARAS, TAKE 3

or, Cue the Waterworks

When I was a kid, my mother convinced my father that I’d done

something terrible, she urged him to spank me, and he did.

His blows were reluctant pillows, pullback and whisper slow,

more for appearance than correction, and while he whupped,

he cried. Slow, beautiful cries, elegant and silent, he wept.

After vowing to never touch his daughter that way, he went

through the prescribed motions, hiding his tears, and I bucked,

bellowed, scripting my twist, knowing what drama was required.

That was the first time I saw a man cry. When your dad became

a bomb, vowing to blow at the continued thought of your mouth

on me, we stood at the bus stop that last day, matching fingertips,

major players in a terrible love story’s climactic scene. I boarded

the bus and clawed the window while you stood on the sidewalk,

the sugar of what we’d been staining your cheeks; all that was

missing were the drooped tulips and aching strings. And the gulp

that happens when a man loses hold and forgets the definition

of man. I wonder if your father ever wonders where I am.

I wonder if he wonders who I was.