Skip to main content

Frank Reardon

A Letter to My Daughter

I'm not going to glorify it.
There's nothing of note to bring it all in
as something only the strong
and courageous consume.
Truth is, I've never been
able to handle it properly.
Too many times I woke up
without memory,
the earth's heart once pumping,
now shattered
upon the ground; by my own
hand, by my own
fatal wallet and need to be seen
as more than I actually am.
There are years of stories,
some humor's ax,
others: the soaking of marrow
underneath the broken land.
If I could tell you what it's
like to wake up in jail,
break bones, hearts, and say things
that are not in your head,
I'd tell you to stay away.
I'd tell you to stay strange,
soul-rich, and daylight galaxy.
What I fear more than death's knock
is that you will discover your gene
and marry too young. And not
to a man, woman, or a dream,
but to a bottle of whiskey.
The same bottle I married
when I was twelve.
The same bottle I've regretted
the last thirty years.
And there will be months, even
years, you'll be able to keep
away from it. Hide in beer. Hide in love.
Hide in heathen. Hide in weed.
Hide in art. Hide in music.
But it'll come back strong. It always does,
only next time with shovel and lantern,
upside the head for the dim light
you'll be running towards
for the rest of your life.
Daughter, I know you need
to experience life for yourself.
Believe me, I know better
than most how it feels
when the wind chimes of desperation,
releasing their songs of plague inside the stomach. 

Frank Reardon was born in 1974 in Boston, Massachusetts, and currently lives in Minot, North Dakota. Frank has published poetry and short stories in many reviews, journals and online zines. His first poetry collection, Interstate Chokehold, was published by NeoPoiesis Press in 2009 as well as his second poetry collection Nirvana Haymaker in 2012. His third poetry collection Blood Music was published by Punk Hostage Press in 2013. In 2014 Reardon published a chapbook with Dog On A Chain Press titled The Broken Halo Blues. Frank is currently working on more short fiction, and building a novel. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

                                               from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

Jim Daniels

Half Days My daughter, thirteen, pale shred of herself, fought an unidentified infection in her spine as it softened her discs into disappearance. I’d unread that story if she were young and still listened to lullabies. After she got discharged, I set an alarm for two a.m. each night to shoot antibiotics into her port while she slept, her limp arm resting in my hand. Her return to school: half days—follow my dotted line smearing across months of sleepless breadcrumbs— at noon I idled high, anxious in the school driveway rattling off the latest test results in the zero gravity of fear. She startled me with the brittle thunk of the car door slam, then snapped at me for staring at her friends as they strolled across the street to the cafeteria, creeping them out, she said, embarrassed by illness like hard acne or a blooming hickey, wrong music or flakey hair, or the tacky middle-school jumper she no longer had to wear. I was there to drive her to

Corey Mesler

  I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful.  I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose.  I was lonely. I was too loose.  I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you.  If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.  COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me