Childless by David Spicer

After my father’s funeral, in my mother’s living room
of cheap recliners, a television terminal with audio gloom,
and a sofa of sags, an aunt’s pipe-smoking husband asked,
Are you going to have kids? I scowled, Not your business,
but no. He said, Come on, Clare, let’s go, your nephew
didn’t like my question, and as they drove away toward Iowa
with their two small sons in bow-ties and dark suits,
I admitted I was an ill-equipped student of parenting’s art:

My father inherited his father’s tools of the trade: the Brain-dead
dumbasses and Monkey-mouth morons or a belt that threatened
more scars. I didn’t trust myself to teach fly fishing or footballs
tossed back and forth, gently flicking my wrists to illustrate love’s
patience for a child craving a father’s embrace rather than cowhide
and angry epithets that wouldn’t let the child forget.

About the Poet:

David Spicer has published poems in Santa Clara Review,  Moria, Oyster River Pages, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares,  Ephemeral Elegies and elsewhere.  Nominated for a Best of the Net three times and a Pushcart twice, he is author of six chapbooks, the latest being Tribe of Two (Seven CirclePress). His second full-length collection, Waiting for the Needle Rain, is now available from Hekate Publishing.