for my birth father
Low creature, I appear at your door,
possum or rat having rifled through garbage,
or a small child sent outside digging
under the house when I belonged
at chairs, at tables, in rooms that once warmed me.
Your dark wall is a shadow I try to scale
as a dog searching her master’s mouth filled
with silence. I call to you over the gate
locked–I love you–each word a scab
broken again by blood. I am the virgin
you have seen outside your bedroom window
watching you make love to any woman but my mother.
I would touch your rough hands. I would kiss them, tend
your bedside, press my lips to yours. I would wind
your arm around my neck. I catch you,
always, in the act of leaving, and I follow.
Karen Carissimo‘s first book of poems, Dream City, is forthcoming from Iris Press. Her poems appear in Many Mountains Moving, North American Review, Notre Dame Review, Western Humanities Review, and other journals.