Sometimes we hid under the beds when he got like that, his anger raining down over the floorboards, hard kernels of hail, a storm that pushed through him every time he drank. We knew nothing about the island then, how he lived on a boat, pulled from his dying mother’s arms, his bitterness reflected in blank spaces between buildings. I kept thinking he’d get better, instead he beat on us like the sea, as if we were rocks, the storm sinking all our ships. Him just whaling, whaling, and us never knowing why—our mother caught in the upstream current, bruised about mouth, nose, ribs aching from the momentum of his blows. We grabbed at the bedposts, hoisted ourselves out the back windows, all the time no help for our hating him, no way to understand what the world had done to him, our pain like crows’ shadows slipping across the shuddering back of the world. Spillway Issue 25 Summer 2017
Poems by Judy Kaber