by Francis Fernandes
The accordion and guitar wheeze and strum
into contortions of love, a double helical staircase,
or the unseen molecule inside us all,
while my daughter sits in the sun-splayed winter
garden playing Nintendo Switch with her
ether-friends. I just vacuumed the living-room,
did my yoga, then put on this music. She washed
up, got dressed, finished her homework. Earlier
we’d shared a breakfast of muesli along with
some well-intentioned cricks and gibes. And now
each of us dangling on our winding strand,
as the fall breeze blows into her glassed-off space,
through the door, and into the rest of the house.
These weekends are too few and far between,
if you ask me, for a whole life to return to its usual
little starts and neuroses: arguing over which film
to watch; or conjugating French verbs, the sight
of her tears with those smears of teenage mascara;
or the evening stints in the park and the notable
progress of her fastball: I’ll feel the sting now
if I don’t catch it right in the pocket of my glove.
A cliquish babbling rises beyond the door
in that room which isn’t quite inside or out. Soon
enough I’ll call her name and together, rejoined,
we’ll cook up lunch in a language only she and I
can recognize. It’s only a matter of time, though,
before her voice trails off into a sphere where
neither the music in this place nor the lines traced
by the baseball from her glove to mine, will make
much of a difference. Only a wispy matter of time –
…..
and that silent nudge from within propelling
her into the larger symbiotic world.
Francis Fernandes grew up in the US and Canada. He studied in Montréal and has a degree in Mathematics. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Zodiac Review, Amethyst Review, Beyond Words, Indolent Books, Third Wednesday, Underwood, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, Defenestration Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Frankfurt, Germany, where he writes and teaches