My Father as Weather
Each morning he rises
out of the scrub grass,
half-thought, half-threat.
The grass doesn’t scream,
just splits its dry mouth to cradle him.
I watch from the bluff
where the sky folds white into a tired napkin.
His whole shape borrows
from wind and sand.
No coat, no wallet,
no time creased
into the pocket of apology.
Just the sea of drift releasing him
molecule by molecule.
I move closer.
I stand where the grass parts
like scribbled sutures,
let his wind-bone shoulder drag
through the part of me
that can’t quit
still asking what I did
wrong by being born.
A field never mourns
what weather carries off.
Even when the sky cuts
his outline like scissors
I outlive. I stay—
salt-numbed & radiant.
What he abandoned,
I gathered:
scrap wind, a dead name,
the luminous debris of his daughter.
by Chrissy Stegman
from Ekphrastic Challenge
Rattle Magazine, July2025
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