Childhood Goes Kaleidoscope, Kaleidoscope, Kaleidoscope, Gun
       

We keep waiting to wake up & know what we're doing;
we've learned to be grateful
for any colored shard of glass
not shaped like a bullet.

We are driving in a blizzard (not a metaphor,
we could die, I have a lot of responsibility
here) & our daughter

is telling us a ghost story, we're listening
for any clues to the riddle
that is her mind at 15—her life

has ceased to revolve
around us. There are so many
bullets, we've learned
not to take these small moments for granted.

In this story, the father
of the children of her Sims character
came to visit, refused to leave.
She built a tiny room, lured him in, deleted the door.

Thirty game-days later, he died.
The story takes a long time to tell,

our son keeps interrupting

to sing "We Got the Beat"
& talk about his plans
for his new AirSoft gun with the biodegradable ammo.

Everything is so dangerous (there
are no metaphors), it's our fault
for giving him what he wanted:

this world, its shattered edges. He has 2,000 pellets,
a freshly charged battery,
a friend to shoot. What more

could a boy desire? She likes
having the ghost around,
she says, better now than when he was alive,

& this sounds like a mostly okay ending,
probably all we can ask.

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Copyright © 2021 Amorak Huey All rights reserved
from Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy
Sundress Publications
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission