Imagine the father as a gardener who plants
and harvests only at night. Imagine the son
and daughter told to make other of themselves.
Imagine an edict against understanding edicts.
Imagine a sibilant song that swims in the soil
like a leviathan. Imagine piercing the skin.
Imagine chewing fennel, an earthy taste of sweet
bitterness, the touching of toes to lips. Imagine
there’s no heaven, only a gated garden of bush
and tree and grass and flower and grove and growth
and beast and bawling child. Imagine losing all that.
Imagine a father drinking from a dark cistern of tears.
–
Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA, 2008) and Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois UP, 2014), as well as two chapbooks from Unicorn Press: The Use of the World (2013) and Of Air and Earth (2019). His poems have appeared in 32 Poems, The Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, Five Points, The Southern Review, The Best American Poetry 2017, two editions of The Pushcart Prize, and elsewhere. He teaches at Coastal Carolina University.