is a bar of soap. And you know this and your father does not—or he does not care. Here he is with the Irish Spring, green in the turquoise pool, sudsless and strange, sliding it up sunburnt shoulders, down lawnmower muscles, back into bearded armpits, making pond scum. The chlorine stings your eyes. Years later and earlier you will see him emerge from the brownie camera, there with the lye soap at the swimming hole he was baptized in, on the creek the cows drank from. But today is for mortification; you do not want to see that boy now.
Paula Reed Nancarrow is a Best of the Net- and Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and winner of the Winter 2020 Sixfold Poetry Prize. Print publications include Sixfold, Artemis and Whistling Shade, with work forthcoming in Permafrost, Paterson Literary Review, The Avalon Literary Review, and Night Picnic.
