You are dead to me but your progeny still burst
through my kitchen door to root like pigs for popsicles
in my chest freezer. You strut up my driveway
like Foghorn Leghorn and give me that game show host grin.
Your nails are illuminated, bit down to gibbous moons
but you smell like gasoline. Your whisper tastes
like menthol. Your words scrape like razor burn. But
once when it wasn’t dangerous it was dutiful, the way
I finger combed the cowlick out of your hair,
straightened your yellow checked tie before meetings
and tilted my chin up, daisy-faced to your sun. I let you,
petal by petal, pick me bare.
Kate Hubbard is a full-time poet moonlighting as an administrative assistant in the Yale School of Medicine. She has an MFA in poetry from New England College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry, Rattle, The Florida Review, Salamander, North American Review, and New Ohio Review, among others.