"Inclement Weather" by Kendra Mills

Inclement Weather

When my father became too ill to stand, he crawled instead
across the linoleum on his knees and elbows. For the finale, he snapped his femur. 

After he died, I found toast face-down on the alarm clock in his bedroom
(digital, but old-school with incredible heft, a clock for a living man). 

He had left for the hospital in the days after Christmas 
and every room in his house became a wound upon entry. 

In the early months, before the morphine reshaped reality in its image, 
he fed a confusion of roaming guinea hens, tossing seed from his kitchen door.

It may have been a fragile joy but he loved them absolutely,
though they filled the walkway to his house with freckled down and shit. 

The path stones have hence migrated west, vanishing beneath ever more insistent ivy. 
The movement of stones can be arresting, in the right context. 

It was spring when the guinea chicks hatched and it was still spring
when they all drowned in a downpour. 

I can’t remember if he saw their little wet carcasses. I did not see his body 
in the hospital. My mother said no thank you on the phone and the words I said

were divorced from their former meanings. I went back to school
and received the worst grades of my life. I did not have to be good,

I learned, so I had root beer floats for breakfast and read a Charles Bukowski poem 
at the funeral, no eulogy. 

Kendra MIlls

Kendra Mills lives in Paris and Massachusetts. She is a recipient of the Elisa Brickner Poetry Prize and her poems can also be found in Jupiter Magazine, Delicate Friend, Version 9, Oyster River Pages, and the Flagler Review.

Headshot: Kristen Kinser

Headshot Credit: Staff