Conversations with Family and Strangers
Poetry in Our November Issue
In C.L. O’Dell’s poem “Driving Upstate with My Father,” we’re taken inside the cab of a pickup, where the narrator wishes for his dad to tell him “the good stuff” from his past. Erik Tschekunow also envisions a conversation in “This Call Is from an Inmate at a Federal Prison”: with hesitancy and hope, the narrator imagines the voice he’ll hear on the other end of the line when he calls a woman who’s volunteered to talk to incarcerated men. If you’d like to hear the authors’ voices, you can click the Play buttons below for recordings of their poems.
Take care and listen well,
Nancy Holochwost, Associate Editor
Driving Upstate with My Father
By C.L. O’Dell
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“Driving Upstate with My Father.”
Driving upstate with my father at the end of a bad year. Trees begin to outnumber houses. Rain turns to snow as fields hang like paintings. Dad fills his lip with chew, talks. The truck is warm and rattles with tools. Every so often we enter a silence as he ends a story and readies the next, about work, or money, or deer. If I’m lucky he’ll share the good stuff and tell me how he almost lost everything, or the time, while teaching my uncle how to swing an axe, he split his shin like celery, filling his boot with blood. The best is when he forgets he’s a man and tells me what he loves. I carried a doe through the dark, he says, and then describes the stars.
This Call Is from an Inmate at a Federal Prison
By Erik Tschekunow
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Click the play button below to listen to Erik Tschekunow read
“This Call Is from an Inmate at a Federal Prison.”
They say you eventually get desperate enough to call a stranger, someone who’s added her number to a database for the incarcerated, someone who’s even more alone than you. It’s amazing, they say, once you’ve picked a name (other stats sometimes provided), the numbers you dial clink like bottles meeting in a sea. Each distant ring is a pair of whirring lips held millimeters from that ticklish spot in the curve of your ear. Will she have the high, lilting voice and self-possession of the weather girl on the radio, or will her Hello scrape and knock like a stone being winched out of a well? And what do you say when she actually accepts the call? Is it to her that you admit you’re not even sure freedom is what you want anymore? They say not to say anything, just listen to how sorry she is about your situation. It’s important to close your eyes. The breeze she says billows her bedroom curtains won’t reach you, drunk on the way by ghosts, but the shiver you’ll get is, you know, more than you deserve.
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