​Dad’s Life Before Me 


Fancy my surprise at finding my face
in an old snapshot, my arm
around a girl with Snooks

scribbled beneath her shapely legs.
Sisk, Goody, and Chet pose
beside us, cigarettes dangling,

their eyes flashbulb tight.
Drunk smiles face the camera
in ever-widening bliss.

The gigantic mirror behind the bar
boasts a dance floor swingin’
to a Chattanooga Choo Choo band.

Sailor hats bounce above the crowd
like seagulls wishful 
over the steady motion of waves.

And all those gunpowder girls,
soft curls the color of honey,
who look like our mothers at nineteen,

wave their assembly-line hands
without a care in the world
at the Crystal Bowl, Frisco, 1945.

There is only one more dance ahead
of daybreak before these Rosies
don aprons, and my mother

and father pose by the bandstand
with their baby boy,
their toes still tapping.

“Dad’s Life Before Me” was previously published in Peninsula Pulse.


​

Because of the War


In the box in the attic
I find the fan
my father bought in Japan
and think of young women,
eye lashes fluttering
like black butterflies
above pale faces.
Rice paper unfolds
on sticks,
and cranes unpleat,
white as pear blossoms,
their crests
like curved red lips.