Watching a small screen bathed in orange,
swallowing the sunset outside my hotel room,
I want to say I love my father like the nine-
year-old version of myself did. My thin-fingered
hands waving, taking deep breaths in December
air sticky with saliva, cheering on our beloved
team, a lineage craving its own collapse,
while we were surrounded by partitioned
stadium seats, Southern transplants, daughters
of the Cuyahoga burning. But I am now the child
of Hope Memorial Bridge, descendant of gas & dust.
Everything I touch slowly rots. The moonlight’s
pull, the ocean’s forgiveness, the sun dissolving
beneath the sky’s crystalline skin: all creep down
my cheek like a dog’s bark against the capillaries
wrapping around my father’s vertebrae cracking
in another state. During the coronation of my
Rust Belt body, an alchemy of flames & constellations
singeing the edges of the television set, a hunk
of swollen offense runs deep into the winter dark—
where they invent some bellowing dance, aching
away another Sunday, waiting for a parade down
Euclid. Tonight, I am a thousand miles south,
watching rows of pale orange seats lean into
the sunset. Tonight, the thinness of Texas fireflies
is teaching me how flooded with yells our Ohio
yard was. I can hear Dad’s voice calling from
the living room: come out here, son. Come watch
the game with your old man. But yet, just as I plead
to the onscreen snow falling: come back, come back,
where it hides in the gaps of a dim sunslant—
the space, like a hand splashing at the surface of
Lake Erie, our long distance seances collect gold
watches & scoreboards. All of them out of time.
This poem originally appeared in The Lowestoft Chronicle.
Matt Mitchell is a writer from Ohio. His work appears in, or is forthcoming to, venues like The Shallow Ends, NPR, Homology Lit, BARNHOUSE, Frontier Poetry, Empty Mirror, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among others.
