Absence Archive
All I Can Tell You
Darkness Thrown Down Like a Blanket
Forced Impossibly
Fossils of Fathers
Ghazal after the Electrocardiogram
In the Moments Before the M Train Arrives
Kept Miniature in Size
Kool-Aid Days
On the Maternity Ward
Parentheses
Pomegranates
Popcorn
Seeks Its Own Level
Telephone
Ten Days in August
The Window Before Which We Last Kissed Is on the Market
Fossils of Fathers
Seth Grindstaff
at the Gray, TN Fossil Site & Museum
I wonder how much guess work paleontologists use
to resurrect vertebrae from shadow. Or if prehistoric
re-creations actually hinge on a childlike imagination,
using scales to patch up what’s beyond memory?
For to deny a child his ghost sends him seeking.
Like when my foster son thought he saw his
birth dad from across the exhibit hall, and there was no
denying his chase up stairs or into vacant restroom stalls.
I remember reading that the excavation site spread
across acres and measured one hundred feet in depth—
a sinkhole, an absence of stable footing that holds
even the tiniest creature that stumbles into its heart.
But I saw Dad was all he said, confident as bone.
At the sandbox display he sifted my silence, still
searching a sure sight. Finding nothing and separate
as sand, we filled our seats to watch a demonstration
of careful hands fostering fossils through this
disconnected period of half-discovered existence—
to be labeled and categorized, to wait in vain
for the rest of their world to return.