Platitude
Zachary Evans
Your father waits at the bottom of
the stairs & sighs. Every morning like
a catapult & he thinks of you, the gray
swirl of bicycle spokes coming gently
into focus like smoke before a mirror.
North Carolina half-drunk with restraint
& the Blue Ridge Mountains snapping like a
set of fog-wreathed knuckles. You sleep too
late & don’t call like you should. Cracked wax
at the rim of a mason jar of moonshine, the fat
pink sun of a peach bobbing slowly in its guts.
This is the lesson here: learn a lot & lose it,
find a home & burn it to the ground. Ash
flecks your tongue the way a snowflake
would, moves towards dawn, cuts the brakes.
Your father turns to leave & overhead, a flock
of magpies lilts past like a voice. You spend
the rest of your life forgetting these things.
Zachary Evans is an MFA candidate in poetry at Colorado State University. His work can be found in Split Lip, Fourteen Hills, Killer Whale, and elsewhere.