by Désirée Jung
After
For ten years we have forgotten
to finish the tiles in the bathroom floor.
Last job of the renovation. Delays
and overruns. The plumber’s
non-stop whistling. His tch tch
drum solo under the sink. Oh Hell.
His two-word vocabulary, dialogue
with dank pipes, duet of whines and bangs.
When he backed his truck
out of the driveway, jangle
of wrenches and pipe cutters
ringing all the way down
the street, the bathroom
grew silent. The floor
a permanent afterthought.
A place in the ether to store
the undone. The way in those days,
we looked for a place to locate
the grief for my father. Sorrow
adrift without words. On hold.
How we meant to mourn only
the good stuff. His tenor harmonies.
His bedtime stories with our names
woven in as if we were forged
in a fairytale before we were born.
And would claim our bright
future in an adventure
we would know as our destiny.
Undone. As if afterthought
is an immutable place. Years ago
I stood in the half-tiled bathroom,
running hot water into the tub
because my father had forgotten how.
Hot and cold too far out beyond
the scope of his memory. While
somewhere from the unfinished
gaps, the songs he sang for us
emerged while he splashed.
Peg-o’-my-heart, Skip to My Lou,
his daughters’ names embedded
into the chorus he repeated
as if all the other lyrics,
the song’s rhymes and repetitions,
were just an empty afterthought.
Ginnie Goulet Gavrin is a retired massage therapist. She teaches meditation and writing workshops at the Monadnock Mindfulness Practice Center in Keene, New Hampshire. She holds an MFA from Stonecoast MFA in Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in The Literary Review, The Worcester Review, Slipstream, Leaping Clear, The Greensboro Review, Rewilding: A Split Rock Anthology, Cold Mountain Review, Tar River Poetry, Silk Road Review.
Désirée Jung is an artist from Vancouver, Canada. She has published translations, poetry, and fiction in several magazines around the world, taking part in many artists residencies. Her series of video poems were screened in various film festivals and won several prizes. Her nonfiction story “Dispatches from the Womb” was nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize. For more information, please check her website: www.desireejung.com.