Snow If You Melt for Me, I鈥檒l Give You Something
by Barrett Warner
My father鈥檚 armored cavalry fatigue jacket
split down the side, ventilated by flak.
His collection of acorns with painted faces,
arranged according to beards and whiskers.
His Mason jar of shark teeth fossils because
all the land was once all the ocean.
The collar from his dog as a kid whose name
he can鈥檛 remember and so calls his sister to ask.
The time he fell to the ground at the woodpile
and sobbed, I don鈥檛 understand my son.
A shoebox where he keeps an assortment of rocks
and 鈥淎ra Heads鈥� he found walking plow zones.
His broken-down Bazooka. His canteen. His ammo
box of leather polish and brush supplies. His helmet.
The way he鈥檇 look at me for ten minutes after I鈥檇
asked him about his day, the day he was having,
The story of the raccoon he stabbed with a hay fork
and drowned in a tub and stored in the ice box
and one day pulled it out to thaw and shot it dead.
Oh wait, that wasn鈥檛 ever his story. That was mine.