Tag: Lessons

Lessons in Walking by Kip Knott

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Lessons in Walking

The day my son was born, I worried whether or not I would be able to teach him how to walk. I knew I would have to hold his hands and lift him off the ground just enough—but not all the way—so that he could still feel the earth beneath his feet. I knew, too, that I would have to let him fall from time to time so he would come to know the joy of getting up on his own. I knew that there would be pain and frustration and anger at me for not always protecting or helping him. And over the decades, he has fallen, gotten up, fallen again, gotten mad, and gotten up again, all on his own. But today, after he picked me up from another in a series of nasty falls of my own, I’ve begun to worry whether or not I can teach my son the proper way to die.

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Kip Knott is a writer, photographer, and part-time art dealer who travels the back roads of the Midwest and Appalachia in search of lost art treasures. His writing has appeared Best Microfiction and The Wigleaf Top 50. His book of stories, Family Haunts, is available from Louisiana Literature Press.

LESSONS by Joanne Grumet

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LESSONS

Henry, my father, was a sweet man,
had a smile for everyone.

He loved to sing opera
along with Jussi Björling

and the other tenors on the radio
though he didn’t know the words.

When I was eighteen, he gave me driving lessons
in our grey 1950s Buick Roadmaster.

One day, when we stopped for a light,
two young men in tee shirts

and slicked-back hair signaled my dad
to roll down the window.

“Your back wheels are going forward,”
they laughed.

My father laughed as well,
“All right boys,” he said.

Later he said, “I had to answer them or
they might have called me dirty Jew.”

I learned that day
how vulnerable he was,

how young men might
shame him for who he was

how his pain was my pain, too.

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Joanne Grumet has studied and written about language as a lexicographer and a linguist. More recently, she has been writing poetry and her chapbook Garden of Eve was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020. She has also had poems published in the journals The Poetry Quarterly, The Same, and Jewish Women’s Literary Annual, as well as online at NYCBigCityLit.com, The Vital Sparks, The Closed Eye Open, and in The Bangalore Review.