Watching Father

By Chukwu Emmanuel

Seven hours of silence. Then the words
leave the tip of his tongue

like a bird, and swoop
into our hands. For a while

we called our hands ark—
let the birds perch, knowing

if we love them, they will circle us back
to the origin. I am twelve—

the dark hemispheres of his hands —
how they feel like eternity

as I watch him smeared with peanut butter
and hair dye. Again, the birds.

He carries a language no one else can hear.
I follow his voice and walk through

the circumference of his life
lived on backyard barbecues—

see me there, learning to hold
forty years—the way we hold an animal

trying to make it heel—
the same hands of the man sleeping on a cot

in the middle of the white-tiled room
smelling of fish sticks and cigarettes.

This week proves the deluge,
which is my father calling me by the wrong name.

Imagine Noah testing his faith
to see if it could sustain life. Imagine

my hands pressed to his face,
our heads thrown forward—

his name now upon the air,
and we are still asking.

Bio:
Chukwu Emmanuel is a poet concerned with the grammar of manhood: how it is performed, inherited, survived, and rewritten. His work examines masculinity not as an identity but as an ongoing negotiation between violence and mercy, privacy and confession, the father’s hands and the son’s mouth. His works have been finalists for Kalahari Review Igby Prize for Nonfiction and Kreative Diadem contest. He believes in the most radical thing a man can do.