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Father’s Day
I have streamlined gift giving
with an efficiency the men in my family
would applaud: a digital meat thermometer
with Bluetooth for all the fathers
in my life—my father, my father-
in-law, my stepfather-in-law.
My husband does not get one
because he does not want
to be a father, but we make love
twice in the same day—
we’re good at it. Making each other
fuzzy with pleasure. I don’t think
two people could have been happier,
Virginia Woolf wrote
in her final suicide note. I think he’s afraid
he is my Leonard, or
I am afraid he finds some joy in it,
making coffee for a woman
who spends too many mornings
drowning in her own mind,
missing the thrill of summer
unfurling outside the window.
I can’t blame him for not believing
I’d be good at wiping asses
and noses, but lately everything
mamas me. The dogs say mama
when I fill their bowls, and the hydrangeas
say mama when I water them,
and my little niece asks whose mama
I am, because I am the right age
and size for a mama. Toddlers clutch
at my legs at zoos and breweries
with fenced yards for children to run
while their parents drink
with friends, with me. It’s selfish,
but sometimes I look at my love’s
long dark lashes, his high cheekbones,
and think—O God, I need more
of him. We could make something
so beautiful. But we don’t.
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Dr. Stevie Edwards is an Assistant Professor at Clemson University, and poetry editor of The South Carolina Review. Stevie’s poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. They are the author of Quiet Armor (Northwestern University Press, 2023), Sadness Workshop (Button Poetry, 2018), Humanly (Small Doggies Press, 2015), and Good Grief (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012). They hold a PhD from the University of North Texas and an MFA from Cornell University. Originally a Michigander, they now live in South Carolina with their spouse and a small herd of rescue pit bulls. [This poem originally appeared in The Southern Review, summer 2023.]
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Photo by Gisèle Freund of Virginia Woolf and Leonard Sidney Woolf, color print, 1939.