my father splitting salmon apart with fork tongs him feeding himself,

pressing the salmon pink, smooth against his mouth’s hard palate, with his tongue

there is a difference in how we speak to each other, now. i see how he was raised in his napkin’s placement in his lap, in his curtness with our waiter. and, i see how many miles he has traveled since then and to here. he will bring up the hours he used to drive. the solitude of time spent sitting. his right hip nerve pinched now, from depressing the brakes in stop-start traffic. i will ask for stories and the alphabet game. he tells me, one road trip, each part of the laser sailboats he learned to sail on. stories of scars on his hands and long-dead pets and humongous fish, of scary midnights on the river and  surviving the ocean sucking him down and throwing him back up into the air. a cross scarred on his ankle. men that were larger than him and people i know only from the way he laughs and speaks of them, with commas between each phrase. i soak in his stories and the spaces in between while he talks and we drive and play the alphabet game, and i have yet to win. but in my mind i am the fly on the wall of the life he tells me. i have not grown wiser from his stories, but prefer to draw them in detail on a map across the roads we travel. i revere the history, so i ask to be taken to rye. the last time i was there a tick rested in my scalp.

doctor’s hands tweezed its blood bloated body out it died, no harm done

the very last time we were there, i wore a velvet black dress and clear tights. i felt like a pretty girl. my aunt returned to me a ceramic turkey i had given grammommy before she passed. it surprised me, the turkey’s shape unchanged

same glossed wings flew back body both detached and from gramommy’s home

he tells me we cannot go back to rye. there is not another last time. i wonder if he has heard of rye bread. i fight with my tongue to not ask for more story. i would like to know how he became

his fish overcooked wet flesh once breathing moist life, chef scorched it dry

there is a difference in how we speak to each other, now. he says i love you in a story, this time an anecdote from a podcast. a psychiatric patient who believed his room to be filling with deadly gas, slowly killing him. to breathe he broke his window and hands, bruised black and blue. older men—they struggle with identity, he tells me. his disposition is calm. sometimes short. he tells me, because his own room has filled with a deadly gas and he bruised and battered and broke a few bones to 

breathe again. and in his story of the podcast his passionate interest and many commas give the space for me to hear him say: i am not strong, i am rational and when i drive back home before i sleep off this salmon i will beat my hands on the steering wheel and sing in a voice, so unlike mine, in any attempt to stay awake.