The map Dad used to drive us there whispered

Find the farmers.  Bedsheet creased and softened from

years of his staring at, that map showed us how to hear Dad’s

breaths as we lolled in the back of our blue-carpeted truck bed,

learning about home sick as he sighed Oklahoma arias. 

He spoke-sang of copperhead-dead cousins wailing in Tahlequah creek,

carboard inserts in his trash-can Keds, and a grandmother who

hated card-decks and cussing.  What you had in your mouth, I wouldn’t

hold in my hand, he said she said.

Look out for ticks and chiggers he’d say as we

cowboy-booted our way over sharpened, road-ditch shale. 

Boulders, big and gray as a Baptist bully, framed the graveled dimple that

Dad claimed as his once-upon-a-driveway.  Five sons had lived there, from

three-and-a-half husbands, his mother taking two of their available surnames like

someone grabbing what she can when her dime store is looted. 

Stories of 4th-of-July misericordias when Ronnie Bobo, middle son,

died from a drunk’s driving on the way back to the rock shack he showed us,

limping and roofless now, a hobbled buckboard horse. 

Dangling like locust on Bermudagrass, its doors augured what can

come when things get left, get gone.

On the way back to LA, we stopped at the Grand Canyon,

bamboo flutes in me and my little brother’s mouths,

leather anklets jingle-belling as we cantered near the edge of that

old, rivery space.  Dad let us.  I knew it cost him. 

What’s the price to be paid for one’s roadmap, for this

man who has policed his family, and his career, with

tender violence?

Joseph Byrd’s work has appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, The Plentitudes, DIAGRAM, Aji, Long River Review, The Ravens Perch, and forthcoming work in Cathexis NW Press, Fatal Flaw, Resurrection, and PROEM. He was in the 2021 StoryBoard Chicago cohort with Kaveh Akbar, was an Associate Artist in Poetry under Joy Harjo at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and is on the Reading Board for The Plentitudes.