My Father’s Birthday Is the Day Before Mine

The last train pulses across the pane

and fireflies spark beside the tracks.

Acne’s red wing flames my face:

I can’t take back

this skin. In the other room,

a drugstore Timex synchronizes

with the faucet’s drip. If I squint,

the fireflies align their lives

to map the summer’s migraine

of flowers that were weeds.

You say, but I think

cheap bulbs, they burn out in two weeks.

The train rattles as its links shift

and scrape like the dark between days.

From across the continent,

my father texts:

your mother hiked halfway up the hill

behind the cabin / a graceful

mountain goat. Is this love?

Lately, I’ve been writing you letters

that I shred about that blood-orange eclipse —

sleep’s determined murmurs

of eyelid and lash.

The fireflies are sunset’s ash.

I realize I have no means

by which to make you a present of the past,

where my father once cowered

behind the June sunflowers,

bloodied by the dog chain his father

had swung — not at his son,

but at the fear

of being left without one.

The fireflies stutter like an apology.

I would be lying to you

if I didn’t admit I love them.