It Would’ve Been My Dad’s 80th Birthday
My sinuses have clubbed fists in them,
caught, I suppose like a beautiful child in a well
the whole country roots for
as they eat their spaghetti’ed plates
their constellations of Le Sueur peas.
At the bridge of my nose
where it is a balcony to my right eye
pressure resides and when I put my thumb there and press
I become a circuit.
My husband has shown me,
with our electrical panel
wide open like a dissected worm,
to hold one hand behind
the back, so, if a charge comes up
you won’t grab onto it,
that your body, tethered only by one hand, will be a ground.
His late father, a man I never met, told him that.
One of the last things my late father said to me
I work to forget; it was about his sickness and suffering,
how that felt…how sad he was about leaving me and others.
I really do have so many questions about the hands:
Where should they be? For whom?
Which one should let go?
But then how to breathe?
What about my pesky wrists?