Poetry
I found him like that, tipped over on his side,
body wide and redolent with age. The lawnmower
looming above him at the edge of the green,
his breath a seesaw’s screech through the clouded
lines of the breathing tube, the beeping red
of his heart monitor and orange of the machine
an echo of the sunset breaking over our bodies,
relics of his evening meal streaking down
the front of his white polo shirt, tucked in
at the waist, and the hill, cascading down below us,
disappearing into gully at the edge of the snow-
heaved road. This loop, a near-perfect two miles,
I had taken to walking at the end of each day,
October sky disappearing into darkness
and the heady rush of cold. The stone wall
marking the edge of the property, changing leaves
of the red oak tree overlooking the manicured
rows of the woodpile. From inside his pants pocket
the sound of a phone clicking to voicemail. His son
on the other end of the line, voice filled
with the same husky grate of five-o’ clock shadow
as my father’s, yelling that he’d gotten the blood-pressure
alerts and was everything OK? Dad, is everything OK?
With both arms and the full weight of my fourteen
years behind me it was all I could do to lift him
from the gravel to a seated position, hugging up
against his back like his own grandchild might have,
years before in that same field, both of our breaths
grown thick, and heavy with the heaving, and I felt,
in that moment of heat, my still-boy’s body stiffen
against him, the white of his head and chest grown
sweaty in the cold. The mingled scents of our salt
and stink rising into twilight. And I waited like that,
in the loaming of the burn, till I heard the rising screams
of an ambulance in the distance. Then I ran.
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Gray Davidson Carroll is a white, nonbinary writer, public health researcher, cold water plunger, and (self-proclaimed) hot chocolate alchemist hailing from Houston by way of western Massachusetts. A Best of the Net and Best New Poets nominee, they are the author of the poetry chapbook Waterfall of Thanks (Bottlecap Press, 2023), and their work has further appeared or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Common, ONLY POEMS, The Offing, and elsewhere.