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​What Was Left of the Sestina after Looking at a Photo Album
of My Father’s Squadron
by Brad Trumpfheller 

​A better son would be able to name these men.
            I have named each violence for whatever it does
 
with its hands: half wave; shaking; holding
            a gun; peace sign; a man in the arms
 
of a man, carried like a husband might carry
            his husband. & my father is there. Laughing
 
at this impossible wedding. When I came out
            to him, he thought I was joking. Disbelief
 
can be a crown of dust. The photographs look
            like objects worth devoting myself to:
 
covered in dust, pious as light
            or a desert turned kingdom by the nameless
 
men. A crown, when divorced from the head,
            is a circle of dusty light. Laughter, uncomplicated
 
from the subject, can become the absence of –
            my head, full of desire, could be the subject
 
of queens. The photographs, a desert
            of fathers, country blindfolded
 
with hands. A crown, uncomplicated
            from its kingdom, can look     like anything
 
you want.        My father can call a war         a war, a queen
 
            a queen,           the photographs nothing                     more than
 
the dead light
                                 laughing hourglass
                                                                                              becomes desert           , kingdom
                                                                                hands               queen
                        violence              the subject
            the crown         object                        
                                                                                              this devotion
 
Oh, today I am impossible
                                                                & headless. 

Brad Trumpfheller is an undergraduate student at Emerson College. Their writing has appeared in Winter Tangerine, the Nashville Review, Assaracus, and elsewhere.

Read more...
Poem For Percival Lowell

June 2017

ISSN 2157-8079
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