As frail as I am with my bandaged head my stumbling abnormality of gait I can still lift my son a leg up into the crotch of the Kwanzan cherry. I can still wrap my one good arm around his waist and heave. I can stand there at sunset spotting him in his tiger-faced rain boots his firefighter’s costume complete with helmet and ear-piercing red whistle (the hatchet had to go). Where low sun gleams in the eye of an exoskeleton a tiny mirror of cicada reflects the setting sun and worn- out father back to himself. That gleam is its backwards glance, its remembrance of the life within, the green flag unfurled through a slit in the spine, the spindly man, ixnayed eastern redbud.
Cameron Morse holds an MFA from the University of Kansas City-Missouri and lives in Independence, Missouri, with his wife and three children. He is the author of nine collections of poetry and serves as Senior Reviews Editor at Harbor Review and a reader at Small Harbor Publishing. His first collection, Fall Risk, won Glass Lyre Press’s 2018 Best Book Award. Visit his website here: https://cameronmorsepoems.wordpress.com/
Featured Artwork:
Un-naming grief
Zaynab Bobi, Frontier I, is a Nigerian-Hausa poet, digital artist, and photographer from Bobi. She is studying Medical Laboratory Science at Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto. Her works have appeared in Strange Horizons, FIYAH Magazine, Native Skin, Lucent Dreaming, Agbowó, Omenana Magazine, MaskLit, Anomaly, Night Coffee Lit, and elsewhere. She is the winner of the Gimba Suleiman Hassan Gimba ESQ Poetry Prize 2022, a Pushcart Prize nominee, a BoTN nominee and recently joined Visual Verse as an intern assistant editor. She tweets @ZainabBobi.