Tree House

By NICK MIRIELLO 

A father is only as good the tree house he never builds
Which he’s promised to his children before
they were script on checkbook, a practiced inheritance
from his father, and his father’s
father.

A gene born in the stars men still look up at from
time to time. Or an explanation for the summer
I went searching for the name of a man
who built the Brooklyn Bridge
with unforgiving stone and sand
and the metal cable wire once
run through his hands.

My mother hosted a young boy
my winter pen pal
the first summer after
the first divorce.

The boy described movies
and wine he hadn’t tasted,
but whose language he learned
from a distant cousin,
another pen pal.

The one who postmarked his letters
from Newark’’s Public Library.
Brick City.

Where young Philip Roth wrote
Goodbye, Columbus, a long short
story, the boy had seen as
a black and white movie.

I sat in awe, while he
proudly rubbed his
small, leathery hands
he’’d stained a purple
black walnut, from
a tree he picked in
California for his
father, who
promised him
a tree house
the coming
summer.

 

[Purchase Issue 15 here.]

Nick Miriello is senior international editor at VICE News. Before joining VICE News, he was the senior international editor at The Huffington Post. His writing has appeared in VICE, VICE News, The Los Angeles Review of Books, McSweeney’s, Guernica, CutBank Literary Magazine, Huffington Magazine, Word Riot, and elsewhere.

Tree House

Related Posts

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.

a golden field of wheat

Thresher Days

OSWALDO VARGAS
The wheat wants an apology, / for taking me this long / to show my wrists / to the thresher boy. // Finally a summer where he asks how my parents are / and my jaw is ready, / stretched open so he can hear about them, / easier. // I may look different after, / I will need a new name.

People gather in protest in front of a building; a man (center) holds up a red flag

Picket Line Baby

AIDEED MEDINA
White women give my father shaded looks./ Bringing babies to do their dirty work,/ mumbled in passing. // I am paid in jelly doughnuts / for my day on the boycott. // My dad leads my baby brother / to the front of the grocery store doors / for a meeting with the manager.