Tag: father
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Invention: Invention as Inheritance
Courtney Stephens’ Invention moves like smoke curling through rooms of memory: elusive, personal, and strangely ceremonial. It’s less a film than a kind of séance with the archive, gathering fragments of familial detritus—audio reels, feverish patent diagrams, domestic footage—and stitching them into a visual elegy that resists conventional closure. As a narrative, it flirts with…
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Trying on My Dad’s Wingtips
I tried on several of my father’s old Brooks Brother suitsjust before his funeral, trying to save myself the expense of an outfit I didn’t need. Each was too tight on the collars. too short on the sleeves, each crotch inseam strangled my manhood.I had outgrown them all.Almost all of it will go to Goodwill-except…
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Skin
SkinI felt the skin of my father—his thumb a soft shawlthat enveloped our intertwined hands.And when the embrace broke— how my tiny fingers traced the moss line of his skulluntil it became a familiar garden.How he would embrace mother, after-wards in her floral gown, so tenderly, thatI would sneak in later to smell the trace…
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Assembling the Crib
He lacked the skill to make it true, the crib, so he assembled it from a wordless diagram,an ark of 5 panels, 32 screws and bolts, 3 tools-tightening it just enough, until the memory of its creation fixed solid in his soul, well past the 1000 days of the child dreaming in it, the 30…
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The Cleansing Cycle
i like to cling to the grimethe small grit of my father’s ashesunderneath my fingernails, the part of him that refused to fall to the rocks in the scatteringmy mother’s scented oil in her hair,her burning fat seasoning in the skilletstinging my nostrils and eyes leaving me seeing smelling less than my faultering earshis ash…
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Prayers and Miracles for a Daughter Passed On
When his daughter died he made a church of his pain, the only truth he believed— the truth of his grief.In that shrine, he could pray, must pray:“Lord, suffer me to know these wounds of which I am. Savor, ease this lonely creature.”“Everything must die in the beauty of your grace.For in that loss I…
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Father, Sin and Holy Ghost
I squatter in the catacombs of remembrance. grinding my bones with pumice and chalk for a fine bone dust to clean the vellum bindings of my soul’s revisions. The scars glitter the ground. All the others with almost identical names, are around me, enough alike to make me doubt the date I was born. Something…
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Our Song of Sadness
Live long enough and your Father will serve you grief with oranges on a silver platter—Shed enough tears and your Motherwill appear, remorse in one hand,a pomegranate in the other—Bury a spouse, and salt will be your servant, once the beloved’s water leaves, and you’ve swallowed the last bitter herbs.Lose a child, and light will…
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She Supposes
She supposes a life beyond this wooden bench,this windswept summer day, this clear blue bay with fur seals mewling on the distant rocks.What will her husband, father, kids do if she dies? Nearby, a boy and girl are playing in the sandy grass.Just watching, a father and son, on another bench,we’re talking sports, memories of…
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Palinode
pal·i·node/ˈpaləˌnōd/nouna poem in which the poet retracts a view or sentiment expressed in a former poem. My father stands in my memory seriousness, good intentions intact. He has shifted in my time from distance to closeness, shed his professional ambition and all his focused successes to enter my life still wearing his white coat and…