what was to come

We ate out that Friday after the ceremony --

on my lapel, a white ribbon. My father

wished it was for valor but it was not,

only for excellence in creative writing.

The misnomer made him uncomfortable,

prompted him to look at his fingers crusted

with 10 year-old dirt. My mother

was beaming while eating a chicken leg straight

out of the bucket. She smiled and talked about

the upcoming summer workshop. New

writers this time, she hoped. And boys, she whispered with

her signature jugular wink.

I was weak with longing for

something different, maybe fish

at Pizzazi's. My eyes burned and burned,

imagining that fish's long tail,

it's charcoaled mouth, coalescing into a tight fist.

I thought about its pain, how I'd

like to measure it, seek it out as something

different from what the chicken

went through. At the corner of my eye,

I see my father picking at his food. His silence knows

about the fish in my mind, my slow consumption

of impossible things. He is ready to put up a white flag.

But it is my mother, after so many years,

how she sat there, random and ordinary in her happiness,

who has made me wishing now that I was still

there, both of them on either side of me,

alive and unknowing of what was to come.