how to talk to your aphasic, mentally ill, brain damaged, post-alcoholic father while sitting at a slight distance from him in a cool river on a hot day in July
by Laura Winberry
I.
last month during a press conference on live television
Andrew Cuomo said wear a mask,
it’s state law. then slid two elastic
loops over either ear, pulled the papery
rectangle down, hooked it around his chin and asserted:
this is nothing I don’t know what this is.
this is like a form of a chin guard. it accomplishes nothing.
II.
the one-liner bio on Andrew Cuomo’s Twitter account reads:
father, fisherman, motorcycle enthusiast, 56th Governor of New York.
in that order. in addition to overseeing
the marriage and women’s equality acts, Andrew graduated
from Fordham University and is a long-time
friend of Billy Joel. yes the American
singer-song writer whose piano-infused hit
River of Dreams is now stuck in your head.
III.
you hate this song and so do I.
but when Andrew Cuomo speaks
you feel at ease. his NY-Metro-area accent like fresh
fruit suspended in a frosted pint glass
of carbonated lemon water. his sun-touched mouth
makes the sound of your east-coast upbringing. of waist-high
nights in Italian kitchens, pork
rolls on fresh bagels to-go, the tick
of spin-2-wins at the Jersey Shore. you stare
at Andrew Cuomo’s mouth as it waxes
about chin straps and state law with the kind of directness
that people who aren’t from where you’re from
call downright rude—you find comfort
in his candid delivery, make it your own mouthful
of lemon-fizz-fruit drink. sip deep. your father
who sounds like Andrew Cuomo
cannot have drinks anymore. or maybe the word
is shouldn’t. when the two of you sit in a cool river on a hot day
in July, you let him pull the small accordion
of his mask down and make a chin guard out of it.
because according to the studies you are far
enough apart and so is everyone else and there is the sun
and the air moving and the cold
water between. and besides, off-air
Andrew Cuomo would
probably say yeah it’s ok.
IV.
ever since before the end of middle school
your father has not been ok. as a kid,
you remember him telling you nothing
I have accomplished absolutely nothing before sinking,
his face turning into what a face would look like
if it were a cumulonimbus on the horizon.
V.
there in the eddy in the river at a distance you listen
to the geese sounding off overhead. the water
that does not stop—its coolness that does not stop
either. your father remarks on the chicas
calientes in their bathing suits along the water’s edge. sometimes
your father sends the entire extended family 3am emails
about how he’s learning
Spanish or writing a legacy-securing memoir or planning
to inlay handcrafted 14-karat gold rings with blue
sapphire and ask Elton John to endorse them through his celebrity.
VI.
other times you receive pre-dawn emails about holy wars, self-defense
methods, why women run the world, or how he started cutting
his Citalopram pills in half and the merits of tapering
off SSRIs. the majority of your father’s stream-of-consciousness midnight
prose contains links you are not sure you should click on. often
you reply thanks, pops! and hope that he feels heard
which is different
than feeling listened to.
VII.
looking up
you see the tough-soft bellies
of geese cutting lines through blue—OG neoprene in flight. your father’s
face and mostly toothless mouth forming words in 5pm sun. his sun-spotted
hands moving up to remove a dragonfly
from his shoulder. you see his shoulder.
VIII.
you look around at the beautiful youth
perched on the un-submerged
hot halves of boulders—summer suds in cans in their hands—and whose bodies
are telling you:
I am beautiful. I am invincible. Now what?
IX.
looking down into the water, through the surface and three feet down
to where the silt and the rocks and the softened sticks do not stir, you remember
the two of you are in an eddy, which is a circular current that tends to flow opposite
a main river. you think you see something in the odd calm of the oppositional
rush—maybe a metaphor for his life or yours or no one’s.
like the links in his emails, you are not entirely sure.
X.
you watch the dusk-swallows dive and swallow
the kind of insects that know how to tightrope pools of surface tension
like Gravelet spanning Niagara—artfully and with full confidence. you take confidence
from the fact that your father has taught you many things.
mostly about survival but also that insects like these are called water-skimmers
and that words are important even when you can’t find them.
XI.
the sound of your father and the sound of the river coalesce, run
away with one another downstream. you don’t say
much. just nod while the geese do another loud pass
and let your father speak how he speaks,
which is not unlike Andrew Cuomo
underwater.
XII.
through the words he finds he remembers
the feeling of suds and cans and soaring. he is smiling
his nine-tooth smile and there is not a cloud in sight.
in a cool river on a hot day in July the east
coast is far away and your father is still
your father, and there are lemons
in your mouth.
Laura Winberry was born/raised in NJ, but currently resides in the PNW. Along with two other poets, she runs Frank Mouth, The Stay Project, and Gold Snow. When not quarantined, she volunteers at a local men's prison teaching/talking about poetry. She fucking loves it. You can holler at her on Insta @winbraker.
