Joint Custody
Evenings with dad we studied other families
on TV: What’s Happening!! Diff’rent Strokes,
Eight is Enough, All in the Family,
then learned the arts of healing from M*A*S*H,
the cures for lives in disrepair
from The Love Boat, and Fantasy Island, where
all losses were restored,
all problems solved in an hour,
less the ads.
We sat together on the orange couch
and ate our spaghetti. Meanwhile,
dad made strawberries
with lemon juice and sugar.
And the night inched up the windows
and the night inched up the windows
until we felt the prickle of its stare
and lowered the bamboo blinds.
*
Raised, educated, and then educated some more in New Jersey (Ph.D. Rutgers, 2005), Julian Koslow left academia to take care of a child with special needs. His poems can be found in Sugar House Review, Delmarva Review, The Columbia Review, New Ohio Review, SRPR, Cumberland River Review, and Paterson Literary Review among others. His poem, “Just Another Drop in the Ocean of Forgetting” received an Honorable Mention for the 2023 Allen Ginsberg Poetry Award.
