Cut Out
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My father spent his war in Sicily. A shy and studious Air Force surgeon, he cut bodies out of fallen planes and pieced them together again. Not much fun, he said, that daily commerce with the dead. He showed a book of sepia photos one day; my father and a lady “holding up” Mt. Etna’s smoke. So unlike Dad to mug and play. Her name was Kate, her curls once fiery red, faded now to olive brown. A nurse; he thought that life with her might have been fine. Her face was snipped from all the shots. Worse, my mother had cut, hoping he’d forget, but the years had made her prettier yet. [End Page 92]
Susan de Sola’s poems have appeared in American Arts Quarterly, Measure, Ambit (U.K.), and River Styx, among others. She is a David Reid Poetry Translation Prize winner, and her photos have been published in a photography/poetry chapbook, Little Blue Man, in collaboration with Clive Watkins (Seabiscuit Press).
