Immense

By JOSÉ ANTONIO RODRÍGUEZ

The wish is always that we’d walk in,
Give each other bear hugs,
Tight and unencumbered,
Nothing of my body shameful,
That he’d cradle my face in his palms
And smile wide, in awe of who I’ve become,
That I’d go to him twice a year
To help me unknot something of my heart
When it broke.
But my father never could be that—
His Spanish and my English,
His love of tractors, my love of books,
His big family, my nonexistent one.
Though, when I can’t help it,
I must accept that the divide
Was much larger. Immense.
If all we could ever speak were cars and weather.
I buried him years ago
In a grave I’ve yet to visit,
Though in my dreams I walk to it
In silence, undress, curl in the grass,
The headstone my pillow,
And ask him how to extinguish
This wish that won’t die.

 

José Antonio Rodríguez’s work has appeared most recently in Salamander, The New Yorker, The Missouri Review, and Pleaides. His newest poetry collection, The Day’s Hard Edge, is forthcoming in 2024 from Northwestern University Press. Learn more at JARodriguez.org.

[Purchase Issue 26 here.]

Immense

Related Posts

never be a punching bag movie poster

Review: Never Be A Punching Bag For Nobody

HANNAH GERSEN
70 acres of rolling hills, playing fields, trees, and waterfront vistas—a shared community space for playing, picnicking, relaxing, and celebrating—was razed and leveled in one weekend. In its place is a long, flat, fenced-off runway.

Hall of Mirrors

November 2023 Poetry Feature: Virginia Konchan and Gabriel Spera

GABRIEL SPERA
Gracefully we hold each other / architects and optimists / always at arm’s length like / congenital dreamers / tango masters slinkily coiled / bright candles in a hall of mirrors / whatever I propose you propose / to conquer repeating and repeating / the opposite.

Filipino immigrants at a farm labor camp

The Ghost of Jack Radovich 

TERESA B. WILSON-GUNN
Mama saw her boss, Jack Radovich, standing in her row during a sweltering San Joaquin afternoon. She was picking table grapes alone when he suddenly appeared, several yards away, gazing off in the direction of the blue-gray Sierra mountains.