By: Candice Kelsey
is my father
filling his shirts
and slippers
with the applause
of pulses sipping
mudbank coffee
with the precision
of turnpike truckers
dabbling ducks
sliding its rook
down the tiled path
of black and white
chess drunk hours of
painting our canoe
camouflage in
the garage but first
wiping its dust
with a cheesecloth
tossing over the 80 oz.
popcorn bash-bags
like an angler
braving the summer
Southwestern Ohio
roller coaster
of typhoon peaks
and whirls only
to placate the heart
of his little girl
before silt-slow and
damned to age
or emptied tumbling
into the rapids
of dementia’s big
river mouth
while I am distracted
by the shimmer
and feather of hooks
Candice Kelsey's work has appeared in such journals as Poet Lore, The Cortland Review, and North Dakota Quarterly. She published a successful trade paperback with Da Capo Press, made it to the quarter finals of the 2017 Able Muse Prize for Poetry, was a finalist for Poetry Quarterly's 2018 Rebecca Lard Award, and recently was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. An educator of 20 years' standing with her M.A. in literature from LMU, she lives in Los Angeles with her husband and three children.
The Little Miami River first appeared in The Broadkill Review https://www.broadkillreview.com/single-post/2019/06/03/Two-poems-1
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