Photograph by Stephen DiRado
Sitting on the porch of the house
the father doesn’t remember is his own,
the daughter confides to the father
that her love for him has become
a trapped animal. The father, almost deaf,
doesn’t hear the daughter. In the daughter’s
humid periphery, the father becomes
a younger version of himself. Hovering
near the hinge between real and imaginary,
the daughter and her young father
exist only as long as the trapdoor’s
capacity to touch gravity. The father,
also imagining, snaps the daughter out
of her vision. He says, I want to go home.
Can you please take me home now.
