Shannon Borg

The voice leaves his throat like a spirit leaving a body. Words deep and English, pronouncing punctuation: comma, stop, line break. Words not in the poem, but needed.

I’ve put a pound into the phone’s empty mouth, falling to its metal heart. My time ticks away. The poem is about a father, three thousand miles away who doesn’t know anything

has been written about him. The man...

my father sleeps a half-sleep, half out of the world. As the surgeon pulls open his sternum, I’m waiting

at a table in the corner of this bar in a city a thousand miles away. The moon pulls at my father’s blood,

and I am caught in the shadow of his dream’s evening; I hear the groan of his old Nash Rambler, dragging

tumbleweeds far from his desert – those empty veins...

Near the edge of town where the graveyard opens out under white sky, a girl stands on a wide porch, looking at the cottonwood trees, her fingers intertwined behind her head. A boy on a ship reads a letter, waits and walks

under white sky across the wide deck, looking at the sea and listening for the wail of kamikazes. He writes a letter: It is silent before dawn. I often walkaround deck. I...