While My Mother Worked the Night Shift

By John Dorroh

My father dipped me in milk gravy
so thick and velvety I wanted to play
with it, mash it into the palm of my left hand.

He offered cathead biscuits before
school on dark January days after the
Christmas hangover. It was almost enough.

How did a barrel-chested man learn
this magic? Softened like golden butter
in a dizzy aftermath, he did too many wars perhaps.

Did you ever kill someone I asked him.
He never looked me in the eye to say one way
or another. It was cold like a scrambled yesterday.

He hugged me like it mattered on Monday
mornings as he led me, hand on shoulder, out
into the world. I felt his skin all day.

John Dorroh has never fallen into an active volcano or caught a hummingbird. However, he managed to bake bread with Austrian monks and drink a healthy portion of their beer. Two of his poems were nominated for Best of the Net. Hundreds of others appeared in journals such as Feral, River Heron, North Dakota Quarterly, El Portal, SHARK REEF and Selcouth Station.

All work by John Dorroh

SHARK REEF

A Literary Magazine

Issue Forty-One - Winter 2023

While My Mother Worked the Night Shift

By John Dorroh