David Baxley
MFA Student
IN THE SHADOW OF THE LEEWARD SIDE
The weight of it
scrapes my bones clean.
I am thirty-eight traveling
with my seventy-eight-year-old father.
He hates the interstate
so we take backroads
to hide the wounded parts of ourselves.
He doesn’t wear a hearing aid
because he wants to keep the silence out.
I stare at every town east of Denver.
One Dollar General
and fields of corn
twisting in the wind.
Twisting the way I twisted as a boy
when he held me off the ground
so he could keep hitting
after threshing the strength
from my body.
We cross the country,
Utah to Ohio,
In a Toyota Tacoma.
Each split in weathered asphalt
threatens to spill the luggage
towering over us in the cab space.
When I was small
my mother would intercede
and intercept the fists
but she wasn’t here.
She wasn’t here
to intercede between
the acrimony of our silence.
She would spare me
when I had collapsed
like the boarded up main streets
of the towns vanishing behind us.
I was spared
the animosity of being tossed
into the corner where we kept our shoes.
I was spared
the sound of her begging
when he broke wedding vows across her face.
I was spared
the taste of his name in her throat
when his hands closed her windpipe.
I was spared
the sight of her head being pushed
through the sheet rock.
I was spared.
I was spared.
I was spared.
I repeat to myself
like the mile markers
that pass the dust encrusted windows.
I want to scream in his face,
push him from the truck,
and leave him rotting to ripen the harvest.
But I don’t.
I nod along to his jokes
and explanations
of how America’s veins have changed
over the last thirty years.
I can’t wait until he shuffles toward
a rest stop bathroom so I can smoke
cigarettes through yellow teeth
because I don’t want to disappoint him
with the burden of my addiction.
When I was a child I would thread
my avian limbs through the guts
of our home
playing at being Jacques Cousteau
or Captain Nemo.
I would hold my breath.
The way our home held its breath
when he would come in smelling of the road.
He drives the eighteen-hundred miles
by himself, seeks shelter when the way forward
is too dark, and my dirty nails
push crescent shaped stigmata
into the fruit of my palm-
my knuckles go white as stars.
Every town has a Dollar General
and fields of corn twisting in the wind.
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