Monday, March 10, 2008

When I Came Home

(After Aimee Bender’s The Girl in the Flammable Skirt)

My father was wearing a backpack
made of stone. Lichen and moss
clung to its sides that left trails on
the carpet as he wobbled across the
room. I don’t like to speak ill
of the dead, but they’re messy and
rather cold. We talked awhile about
the afterlife and what a fucking
nightmare it is being entombed. I
couldn’t remember what he liked to
eat, so I fixed him a grilled cheese
sandwich out of provolone. After he
was gone I remembered he liked eggs
fried inside buttered bread and I had
forgotten to tell him that his namesake
had a reddish beard and was brewing
his first batch of beer.

**

Poem Version of the Fiction Prose

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