About the Dead: Poems

As Broken in the End

[64] A S B rO K e n i n T h e e n D it wasn’t June but late August when my father slowed the minivan onto the shoulder—a sign: Hot Boiled Peanuts, a white paper bag turning translucent with grease, oil cooling on the steering wheel. What brand of wisdom does one buy from a roadside stand swaddled in Spanish moss at the tail end of a Floridian summer on the last family vacation? not a single word was ever spoken about what it meant to quietly raise a family, to suffer as his father suffered, to be a man. ...