ELEGY IN KEY OF HARMONICA (FATHER POEM)

 

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If there’s a harmonica,

I’ll listen. If there’s a mysterious

ailment, it will kill you.

 

Could you hear, in the end?

I hope not.

 

Running, I think sometimes of you

at Quaker school, running.

 

At night I am bitten

by mites blazing up my belly.

 

Itching, I think of you itching, encased

in a white suit I never saw,

an astronaut trying to float down to earth—

 

but the earth

won't take you.

 

The train's horn casts a line that travels

across forgetting.

 

Soothe me with a song

scribbled on a napkin,

a walk in the cemetery.

 

Read me a Rootabaga story

told by Potato Face Blind Man

about Blixie Bimber or Gimme

the Ax.

 

I’ll come home from the neighbor’s

where I’ve gone to sulk.

 

My head, your lap.

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BIO:

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Renee Lepreau is a graduate of the MFA in Creative Writing from UW-Madison and the recipient of the William W. Marr Graduate Prize in Creative Writing. She has also received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Community of Writers and a residency at Ucross Foundation. Her poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, TYPO, The Boiler, Southeast Review, Cream City Review, and others.