A morning with my dead father by Linda Laderman

A morning with my dead father

                       The morning air is all awash with angels
                                     — Richard Wilbur

This is the morning I’ll spend with you. I’ll have the conversation I’ve been putting off, the way a child sheds the coat her mother insists she wear despite the April sun, warm like the nape of a newborn’s neck. This is the morning I’ll say what it was like to live inside a widow’s weeds, how it tangled my breath, stole my words. This is the morning I’ll think of what’s possible and make space for you to enter. When I hear the leaves rustle I’ll believe you’re listening. I’ll rest on a rock near the lake and throw pebbles in the water and consider each ripple as thoughts that bounce between us. This is the morning I’ll reimagine you as the young man in the snapshot I found—you leaning against a 1938 Dodge sedan, fedora tipped to the side, smiling, with a hint of a swagger, confident that the ground beneath you would hold. I’ll talk like I remember you cradling my baby body, how you called her song of my heart in the love letters you wrote from Kentucky. Who were you then? This is the morning I want to know.

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Linda Laderman is a Michigan poet and writer. Her poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, numerous literary journals, including Eclectica, The MacGuffin, SWWIM, Action Spectacle, The Westchester Review, and ONE ART. She is a past recipient of Harbor Review’s Jewish Women’s Prize. Her micro-chapbook, What I Didn’t Know I Didn’t Know, can be found online here. In past lives, she was a journalist and taught English at Owens Community College and Lourdes University in Ohio. For nearly a decade she was a docent at the Zekleman Holocaust Center near Detroit. More work and information at lindaladerman.com.