GASOLINE
Father, our house is on fire
and I fear you lit the match.
You held it in your teeth
like my tiny body, like a fish
struggling to swim upstream.
But you were not always awful,
which made you more of a lock
I had to crack. I took two bobby pins
from the drawer of mom’s dresser
when she wasn’t looking.
I spent all night in front of
that lock. No luck. Some mornings
before school I’d awake to you
rubbing my back, and even then
I woke scared of your silence
in the dull light. I know the cause
of the fire, this is not a mystery
any longer, but I am walking
through each burnt room.
To find where it started,
I only have to find the room
with the most damage.
ADMISSION WITH A THOUSAND DEAD BIRDS
after the thunderstorm a thousand birds fell from the sky
pulled damp to the earth the grackles European
starlings red-winged blackbirds filling trash bags
of those who picked them up in Missouri fields and I admit
I don’t know where poems come from or how they are
given this morning while reading I started
an argument with my wife over nothing
and she thunders off leaving me anxiety
electricity and I admit I caused
the storm knowing the truth doesn’t help it go down
any easier I admit those birds took off from their branches
expecting to land where they chose their feathers
catching the wind in their descent the branch
doesn’t wait for us to land or the hard ground
to take us in like a prayer or a door closing
in a house you share
RAIN MACHINE
if I walk outside and the weather is not
hot not cold either the sun behind
the tree line my head can turn on
the rain machine the street going dark
like a period piece set in northern England
the camera on a crane lowering down
two stories through the rain through the rain
lit up by the streetlamps my head’s not
right I work on it I do but often
too often my head is pressed one ear against
the grave listening to the dirt plucking
its notes again the chord always E minor
in the morning dew I asked for sunshine
I took the pills they don’t as much
as I try make the rain go away
but they help me see the machine
the rain machine the hoses running up it
like veins all the tiny holes creating
the rain itself the pills help me see
that above the rain machine above even
the camera itself is the sky
WHEN MY GRANDFATHER COULDN’T
keep driving when the doctors told him
he couldn’t anymore safely drive
his Cadillac his only symbol he’d made it
out of the poverty the one-room farmhouse
he was born into when my grandmother
took his keys from him he searched
the house each room each drawer
then the car itself underneath each seat
when he realized she took his keys
away from him he found her in the bathroom
standing at the mirror he took her
by the wrists and stood over her almost
two feet above her and threw her against
the floor he was no better than his own father
who he watched beat his mother before
or after she played piano and my grandmother
from that day forward crushed Valiums
into his coffee her only way to keep
herself safe when his temper would rise
like a sun flare she’d rush in and say Burt
your pills and then give him even more
five years later my grandmother didn’t
cry at his funeral she walked up to
his open casket wearing yellow
her favorite color she walked up to
his casket said nothing and walked away
About the author
William Fargason is the author of Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara (University of Iowa Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Iowa Poetry Prize and the 2020 Florida Book Award in Poetry (Gold Medal). His poetry has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Barrow Street, Indiana Review, The Cincinnati Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. His nonfiction has appeared in Brevity and The Offing. He received two awards from the Academy of American Poets, a scholarship to Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a 2018-2019 Kingsbury Fellowship. He earned a BA in English from Auburn University, an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in poetry from Florida State University, where he taught creative writing. He is the poetry editor of Split Lip Magazine. He lives with himself in Sparks Glencoe, Maryland.