Moses Ojo
Father’s Day
William Fargason
I mail my father a father’s day card
and every year I lie the fish he caught
was the length of his forearm he hadn’t
hit me with a belt the shirt I wore in bed
torn open like a letter fused back together
like a zipper he was home every night
for dinner when we prayed we prayed
to thank God for every calamity he bestowed
upon our heads I mean my head
I told my father every lie I could think of
because it’s only here in the poem
I can stand up to him it’s only here
in the poem I can tell the truth
Against Legacy
by myself, walking nowhere
in particular but one direction
away from the direction
I came, if I look behind me
and notice my footprints
like a trail of small moons,
the water will rush up
and smooth the shore,
and the farther I walk
the more is erased.
William Fargason is the author of Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara (University of Iowa Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Iowa Poetry Prize and the 2020 Florida Book Award in Poetry (Gold Medal). His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Narrative, and elsewhere. He earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland and a PhD in poetry from Florida State University. He lives with himself in Sparks Glencoe, Maryland, where he serves as a poetry editor at Split Lip Magazine.