So, I'm stuck inside the airport
with a Cabernet and a boyfriend
who won't stop playing
Fallout Shelter on his cell phone,
and there's that moon again,
getting all dirty blonde behind
the clouds, and I can't remember
the last time I spoke to my father
before he killed himself with drugs,
we think, though the report hasn't
yet arrived, and I hate my aunt
who planned his memorial service
because who ever said I wanted
that song, "Dance With My Father"
to play when, honestly, I never
danced with him in my whole
boring life, and I can't get
the feeling out of my heart that I did
all the wrong things, like maybe
being passed out drunk in a cab
when he called me once, and who knows
if that talk might've changed things,
and I just want it all to stop,
so I look at that sky, and there I am
again, a child in Dad’s wiry arms, my mom
looking on, and isn't she smiling,
and isn't my anger tamed finally,
and isn't the guy who's not yet
my boyfriend somewhere in the universe not
playing Fallout Shelter but waiting
for me to pull my thick bangs back
with my glasses and rest my head
on his lap, and when I die will it hurt
the way it hurts to know they found
blood on the dishes in my father's
apartment, or that he was alone,
or that the truth is, the last time I saw him
was outside that McDonald's
in Middletown, Ohio where he smoked
a cigarette and waved and said, Hey,
Steph, and my heart sank to look at him.
✶✶✶✶
Stephanie Rogers grew up in Middletown, Ohio and now lives in New York City. She was educated at The Ohio State University, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, Southern Review, Pleiades, Ninth Letter, Copper Nickel, and New Ohio Review, as well as the Best New Poets anthology. Saturnalia Books published her first collection of poems, Plucking the Stinger, in October 2016.
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