Threading

A Poem for My Stepfather, My Derek.

The mother calls.
My stepdad’s memory is fading.
He’s lost his threading
the stitching that once held him together
has come undone.

When I was five,
my mother asked us to call him Dad.
It never sat right.
He was never Dad, just my Derek.

We kicked a football
down a sloped backyard.
Once, I tackled him—
gladproud in my small, muddied triumph.
That day I learned: all men are to be overthrown.

Another time
I found betting slips
stuffed in the underbelly of the toilet—
shredded totems of failed gambles.
He told me to keep it our secret.

I didn’t.

The furied vein,
the furrowed brow,
the cracked purple lips.
He never hit me,
but I’d drive him so angry
he’d chase me up the carpeted stairs,
both of us acutely aware
of the boundaries of inherited flesh.

What passes through bloodlines
doesn’t always remain.

Still, he is embroidered beneath my skin

The tapestry of our years
folded into my existence.

Some nights, as my children sleep,
I go to the shore,
listen to the brushing waves.
It’s so dark out here.
So dark on the horizon.
Memory plays tricks.
I imagine whales breaching in unison,
bellies flashing, bodies turning into sound,
pushing the waves closer to my feet.
A pod surfaces between worlds—
the warming seas bring them nearer,
chasing salmon heavy with eggs,
a reminder
that everything is connected.

My Derek ran marathons.
The photo still framed in the Dorset bungalow:
his fastest time in Glasgow,
two hours, fifty-four minutes, twenty-one seconds.
Each time he told it,
he got faster.
By eighty-seven,
he was running that goddamn marathon
in under two.

The last time I saw him
was in the California heat,
winter sun blazing down,
the pandemic a whisper on the horizon.
Red-skinned in the yard,
he sat burning in silence.

I said the unsaid
“Thank you,”.
Then asked,
“Are you afraid of dying?”
“Yes,” he replied,
his voice unsteady, stripped bare.
“I’m very scared of death.”

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