The mole on my rib is a little island. Red mottled
with brown where brown once mottled black. One
of many in the torso archipelago, the only one
whose shore has shifted, flesh expanding from one bone
to the next. A jagged coast…
It reminds me of my father. How once, when I was
a child, a family of moles made a nest
under the stone firepit out back. & how my father,
striking his season’s first flint, transformed
the nest into a little earthen oven. His fire filled
the ground until it pressed in on the moles,
until they had to outrun it—the damned
escaping hell, fur smoldering, as they crawled
from the center of the inferno, animated ash.
My father, startled,
grabbed a log he’d yet to splinter with his ax,
strained his muscles to pull it high over his shoulder,
then dropped it again & again on their heads.
The poor blind burning creatures each returned
to stillness—how they must have looked asleep
under the soil. After he was finished, my father
looked at us, my brothers & I, & growled:
Stop that crying. If they tunneled under the house,
it would collapse.
Why is it that I want
my father now? Take comfort in this version of him
that terrified me in my youth? A callus
on his large hands softened. My father feeling
in that moment as exposed as I feel now.
Wanting to protect me from a threat so real
it could only be imagined. No matter how much
we cling, build breakwaters & jetties to slow
the tides, we are not ready. They come.
They ask us to return their sand. We plead, erode.
Lucas Jorgensen is a poet and educator from Cleveland, Ohio. He is a recent winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest and holds an MFA from New York University where he was a Goldwater Fellow. Currently, he is a PhD candidate at the University of North Texas. His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Poetry, LitHub, The Massachusetts Review, Copper Nickel, and others. You can find Lucas on Instagram and Twitter at @lucasljorgensen.
Photo credit: Beeki