father's_day raze we'll know where we're going when we get there. just drive. there's a woman selling welcome mats at the side of the road. a man shakes ashes from the ember of a cigarette through the rolled-down window of his black truck. he's got yoda on the dashboard and a boa constrictor coiled around his left bicep. all the post-mounted mailboxes look like old electric typewriters. try to memorize the numbers and names. they're already gone. the sixth and fourteenth concessions are reborn as charlatans after losing everything below the chest. a tarnished child's slide is free to a good home. brown and white horses graze between the latched wooden walls of their paddock. beyond that, fields of wheat. solar panels and empty silos. a tipped-over washtub. windmills whirl somewhere far away, and the sun tattoos the top of your hand with words from the back glass. we stop at a small cemetery in essex. someone's mother sleeps in the ground beneath my feet. a miniature mausoleum wears a white cross for a crown. i scrape the side of my smallest finger against a brown door and coax it open. the inside of the cupboard is brimming with ladybugs. eighty-nine dead and one still living. flies and the shattered shells of nuts sit on an old tree stump. its crooked mouth lets me see all the way down to the dirt above whatever roots remain. i can make out the sepia swirl of sand or cinnamon, and a spear of something green that's doing its best to grow where so little light gets in. on the return trip, a utility pole stripped of its power leans against another that still carries current in its veins. this is how we hold each other up. 220619 ... ovenbird My list of favourite people in this world is short, and my father is very high on that list. This year, like every year of the past twenty, I will not get to spend father’s day with my father. We will spend the day separated by thousands of miles and I will call and it won’t be enough. “I have about a dog’s life left,” my dad keeps saying, “if I’m lucky.” That can’t be right because I’m sure it wasn’t long ago that dad and I went to the theatre to see Disney’s Tarzan because Phil_Collins wrote and performed the music and dad wanted to see it, and we went even though I was sixteen and probably (in the eyes of the world) too old to be seeing a Disney movie with my dad, but it stands out as this beautiful flash of memory–dad and I eating popcorn while Phil Collins sang “You’ll Be In My Heart.” Listening to this song now, for the first time in decades, I suddenly find myself crying, because (though a little sappy) it expresses exactly what my father has been to me my entire life. The final lines are “just look over your shoulder, I’ll always be there.” And he has been. He was there holding me as a baby; he was there sitting me in front of the record player and blasting my tiny brain wide open with the Beatles and Led Zeppelin and Alice Cooper; he was there at every single recital and concert and play; he was there the night I broke up with my first boyfriend and came home barely able to stand due to grief; he was even there when he wasn’t there–when I went away on a high school trip to Europe, dad sent me with a pile of letters, one to open every day. I have never looked over my shoulder and not found him. I hope when he looks over his shoulder he sees me too. I hope he catches a glimpse of the person I grew to be, in no small part, because he loved me. 250615 what's it to you? who go blather from