I’m riding in the car with my Dad to his warehouse
where he keeps all his gear because he’s
got a gig at the Marriott for some Rent-A-Car people
from Gary, Indiana. On the way, he makes his usual three stops:
McDonald’s, 7/11, and finally Publix, where he cashes in a hundred
and fifty dollars worth of scratch offs
he kept from the lottery gig he did down in Boca,
and the whole time I’m talking to him about poetry.
“You don’t make a lot of money,” I tell him, “unless you get published
in, like, some big place, or you write
a book, or win a contest, and even then, we’re talking max a thousand
bucks, but there’s this guy Ross Gay,” I tell him and he laughs
because while my father is very competent with a microphone
and a top forties playlist, he still thinks
the word “gay” taken out of context as funny as it gets.
He grew up in the 80s, went to college in the 90s,
and while that’s not really an excuse in the year of our lord
Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta 2024
whatyagonnado? I keep talking about poetry, about Ross Gay
and his book about the Philly’s basketball player, Dr. J, and how versatile
the whole genre of poetry can be, how you can talk about
basketball legends while tackling systems
of oppression and human sexuality all in the same breath,
how I feel like something between an architect and a psychoanalyst
when I let my fingers glide across my keyboard,
trying to find exactly the right words
for what is constantly circling my little rat brain that seeks
out only pleasure and cheeses, the two things often having
a lot to do with each other, because where there’s cheese, there’s usually
pleasure, like at art showcases and poetry readings,
and if they have cheese at a poetry reading or an art showcase, there’s
usually red wine afoot, and I’ll never forget that one time
I drank so much red wine at one gallery I almost snorted pinot
noir all over this surreal painting
of a dead lamb holding the latest version of an iPhone, which,
I’ll have you know, was worth eight hundred dollars,
something my poetry cannot afford. I tell all this to my Dad.
He says nothing. He just drives along
and listens, or doesn’t, until we finally pull into the warehouse gates
and he looks at me in the middle of telling a story about
Margaret Atwood losing it over a student asking her if she liked
writing poetry more or fiction, and my father,
as bluntly and plainly, with as straight a face as I’ve
ever seen him make, looks directly at me and asks:
“Are you sure we’re related?” I should mention my soccer super star little brother,
Cooper, is in the back seat, and he cracks up.
He didn’t like my jokes about Robert Frost or Maya Angelou,
but he can appreciate questions of fidelity when they’re packaged
like punchlines that knock me square in the face. Honestly,
I don’t know what to tell him. I think about
explaining where babies come from, but there’s a twelve year old
present, and that’s a cheap shot anyway, so I’m slow
for a response. I decide to not say anything and stop talking.
“No offense, dude,” my Dad says again,
“but I just don’t understand how you started doing all… this.”
He waves his hand in my general direction, as if I’m a fog
that just formed and is taking up too much air.
I’m humiliated and I can’t speak,
which is something only my father knows how to invoke.
We start to pack his heavy speakers, stands, and mics
into the back of his truck, lifting them onto a dolly and into the muggy
Orlando parking lot, when a chill runs over me.
I have this realization: I’m doing the thing I most despise
about poets and poetry, that I will walk out of literary conferences
and leave readings because of. The thing I most hate about poets
is when they talk too much about poetry. It’s really
a conundrum, and maybe I’m the only one, but one time I saw a great
poet sit down in a church-sized auditorium and give a brilliant reading,
but the second they started talking about their craft was the moment
I wanted to get up and yank the microphone
out of their hands and say, will you please shut the fuck up about poetry,
Mr. Poetry? Thank you very much. It’s not so much about
the poetry really, because look: I really love poetry. Poetry is like
wading into an ocean as the sun sinks
on the horizon, the salt wind in my nostrils and the sand
on my feet, and here I go doing that shit again,
talking about my first great love, and maybe it’s because I’m jealous
when I hear people talk about poetry,
like I was when I heard my first serious girlfriend talk about her many
partners before me, as if when people talk about poetry
it’s like they’re describing how good my lover is in bed,
and while this is getting wildly more romantic and more monogamous
than I was intending to get, let’s go with it: I know my love like
I know the tar black lakes of Central Florida, like the loblolly pines
that shoot up from the swamps and the saw palms in the prairies
where the river otters like to hide,
and when somebody tells me they know my darling better than I know
my darling I come off my hinges. I don’t own poetry. I never claimed to own poetry.
Poetry has had many a great lover before me and there will be
many more lovers after
who’ll run their tongues over lyrics that only they can write
between themselves and what they want to call poetry,
and I’ll never claim that I love poetry more than anybody else loves
poetry because I’ve seen the way
people have turned themselves inside themselves to get a line straight
and I’ve heard these “greats” go on and on about their routines
and rituals and how they need a good local coffee shop and a cup of earl gray tea
to set the table for their muses. Sometimes
I’m not even sure if we’re speaking the same language, if all
there is is the academy of it all, the awards, the book deals,
the bragging rights, and the coveted years of being abysmally underpaid
to tack on some three letters at the end
of your name when you could earn much more by being
an asshole on the internet, an influencer on TikTok, a host
of a celebrity gossip Youtube channel, and sometimes I think
about my other brother, Conner, who does maintenance
on the Seaworld penguin enclosures, how him and his girlfriend
educate me on how to properly refer to the dolphin tanks–pools, not tanks.
I think of the two of them together underwater and how it must be
just a little nice, after the smell of animal shit
and jousting male dolphins and the impending threat of an eight
thousand pound orca looming behind a thin cage, separating one pool
and another, how it sucks the water with its lips through the slats to taste
twenty-something year old blood
since they’ve been so long absent from the Pacific–it must be just
a little nice to work a job where I don’t have to think
so fucking poetically all the time, where a shift is a shift and I don’t
have to put in all of this think-y work. But I know
that gets boring, too, because my other other brother, Tanner, has worked
the same job for the last six years locksmithing and he hates it so much,
he signed up to join the Space Force. “At least there,” he says,
“I can be in another state, looking
through telescopes and flying planes
and spying on shit.” I hate the military, but I take his point,
and I know where I stand. I know what’s worth it, and I’m not done
talking about it yet, so after what feels
like forever of silence from the 508 to I-4 and down International Dr,
I look at my Dad and tell him: “Well, doesn’t it all make sense?”
like I’m talking about the person I will one day marry,
and he looks at me with a face
that tells me he knows I’ve already given my heart away.
“I guess,” he says, which is as much as I’ll get from him. I’ll take it.
I’ve already got everything I’m looking for.
Parker Logan is from Orlando, Florida and lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His work has been featured in Split Lip Magazine, Gulf Coast, Pleiades, and elsewhere. He works as a teen library tech at the East Baton Rouge Parish Library. You can find more of his work at parkerpoetry.com.