Tag: father/daughter (Page 1 of 2)

At the Dive Bar After Thanksgiving

1 April 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Olivia McGill

We were at a bar with my partner Sam’s friends. Cal showed up late in the night. I hadn’t seen him in a while but heard how things were going for him. His wife kicked him out for the sake of their seven-year-old daughter. He was crashing at his woodshop.

His dark hair was grown out and slicked back. He wore his normal outfit, basically an Ace Ventura getup with a Hawaiian shirt and teal pants. With his good looks, it used to seem quirky, almost cool. But now, the overall effect was nauseating. He was no longer parodying a slimeball. He was one. His shirt was unbuttoned halfway down his chest, and his normally tan, toned skin looked clammy.

Of course, the presence in people’s eyes is different when they’re on drugs. Distant. Wandering. But it was more than that. His eyes looked wider, slyer, his eyebrows more arched. I wasn’t shaken, per se, but had that subtle feeling that his arrival was doing something to my brain, somewhere deep in the engine room, where I couldn’t quite reach it.

“I like your sweater,” he said as he pulled at someone’s sleeve. “I love your hair,” he told me, his too-close gaze hooking into me as I tried to smile and turn away at the same time.

I tracked his movements as he hovered around the bar, bouncing from one group to the next, his unwantedness not registering for him. He slunk into the booth behind ours, and I tried to carry on a conversation but felt his presence above my head. He spilled a stranger’s drink. Then he slowly climbed over the booth wall, pried Sam and me apart, and sat in between us, his intense eye contact ping-ponging back and forth.

“Where’s your girlfriend?” Sam asked. Cal had a new girlfriend who looked like his wife but who was annoying. “She’s in Mass…,” Cal said wistfully, reminding me of my father. The self-pitying tone of the addict during the holidays. Just a few days before, my dad sent me a text asking, “what u doin for thanksgiving.” I knew it meant all his buddies were with their families.

I wanted to ask Cal about his daughter but didn’t, unsure of what it might trigger in him. I didn’t know how often he saw her. And anyway, it was clear that he was not identifying as a father at that moment. It was like I was watching a different angle of my dad’s life, the one where he parties and doesn’t think about his children. I was in the role of the friend instead of the daughter. It wasn’t happening to me. It was happening to another little girl. I thought of who the friends might have been. The ones who thought of me as they watched my dad stumble and wander.

I’ve been through a lot of therapy. Sam told me a while back that Cal’s wife is in AlAnon. That’s the one where you know an alcoholic or addict. I’m in the one for people who were raised by them. I wonder if their little girl will end up in the same program, working to undo all the damage being inflicted on her despite the efforts of the single mother.

The funny thing about having an addict for a father is you don’t usually have a clear picture of what you missed out on. And when you see it, fathers in white collars coming home at the same time every day, taking their girls on outings, talking with them lucidly, you think it’s “icky.” It’s “too tender.”

And then. After you’ve accepted what happened to you and grieved what you missed out on. After you’ve learned to stop expecting anything from him. After you’ve found your own source of stability, joy, and love and have seen a glimpse of who you are despite him. After all that, you end up at a bar and a friend shows up and it’s him. It’s your father, twenty-five years ago, woodshop and all. Just switch out the Hawaiian shirt for a cowboy hat.

And part of you can’t help but think, “Stop everything. We can’t let this happen again. There must be something we can do.” But everyone just shakes their heads and exchanges looks. And the daughter remains unmentioned. And you keep thinking, “Something should come of this.” And nothing does.

Olivia McGill is from Hell’s Kitchen and lives in Brooklyn. She writes for a consulting firm and volunteers with Showing Up for Racial Justice. You can read her work in Danse Macabre, Ant vs. Whale, and The Adult Children of Alcoholics blog. She is working on a book-length memoir.

September 29

1 February 2025 / Editor

Poetry by Lorelei Feeny

for Dad

Today might be your last full day on earth
but know that I’ll think of you
every time I go to the Dollar Tree.

And whenever John Grisham writes a new book
I’ll put your name on the waiting list
even though you said he always tells the same story.

I still have your pocket avocados growing in my apartment,
windowsills lined with trinkets
given to me when I was a little girl.

and after
all these months
i can release
my grief
held hostage

From endings, new beginnings.

Lorelei Feeny was born and raised in Raleigh, North Carolina. She loves words and learning foreign languages. Her dad inspired her to write poetry. Read his poem The Garden published in The Bluebird Word in July 2023.

Snapshot of Christmas Eve

17 December 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Christine Andersen

We could take the car
to deliver gifts to the neighbors—
the wind chill is below zero,
but my father likes a brisk walk,
and so do I.

It’s an icy mile to our destination
past snowy fields put to bed for the winter
and a frozen pond where rainbow trout
swim sluggishly at the bottom.

The silent moon hangs overhead
like a misplaced ornament,
its opal light casting a shadowy labyrinth
of barren branches across the lane
and onto low drifts rippled into a white foam sea.

Gusts of opaque December wind
cut our foreheads in a rain of shards
as we curl ourselves into woolen scarves,
chins tucked tightly to our chests.

I clutch a holiday bag in one hand
and loop my other arm around my father’s.
Together we march through
the maze of tree shadows,
harmonizing a muffled chorus
of Santa Claus is Coming to Town.

Christine Andersen is a retired dyslexia specialist who hikes the Connecticut woods daily with her five dogs, pen and pad in pocket. Publications include the Comstock, Ocotillo Review, The Awakenings Review, Gyroscope Review, The Bluebird Word, and Glimpse, among many others. She won the 2023 American Writers Review Poetry Contest.

The Big Dipper

1 September 2024 / Editor

Poetry by Lana Hechtman Ayers

This unseasonably tropic night in Oregon in June, fir and spruce trees
so thickly interwoven, barely enough space between branches
for shadow, let alone the glass teeth of stars, and I am orbited back
to one lime Jell-O and orange cream popsicle summer,
another unseasonable June, air thick as guttural slurs,
when everyone in all five boroughs flipped on their air conditioners
at once, sucking the power dry as thistle, lights dowsed in the great
28-hour black out, and New York City became a meadow again,
a pristine prairie, the streetlamp and skyscraper bruised sky
brighter than the red and green blinking signals of jet planes
that thunder-growled low over us from nearby JFK every night,
brighter than the scarce fireflies already flickering on extinction,
my daddy and me sweating and swatting mosquitoes
on the two-chair porch, he teaching me about the stars,
his hands spread above us thumb-to-thumb,
the rest of his fingers upright to frame the constellations,
and there he hung the Big Dipper for me,
the Big Dipper with its long ladle handle and rectangular bowl,
and perceiving this mystical silhouette for the first time
was a kind of epiphany, with my daddy retelling the many sagas
of the Great Bear Ursa Major from indigenous cultures
around the world, chronicling the true accounts
of how in our own nation this constellation
saved the lives of many slaves
who followed its stars north to freedom,
and I understood how our stories,
back to the beginning of man,
are made of such fragile connections,
dot to dot to dot, twinkling beacons of meaning,
how imagination is part dream,
part real-life experience,
that we can all slake our thirsts from this well,
dipperful by dipperful,
so that each time I spy the Big Dipper in the sky now
it is also the tender tale of a father and a daughter,
his patience and our laughter,
so much laughter I still feel its pulse
orbiting the fatherless galaxy of my heart.

Lana Hechtman Ayers, architect of the “Severed Sonnet,” has shepherded over a hundred poetry volumes into print in her role as managing editor for three small presses. Her work appears in Rattle, The London Reader, Peregrine, and elsewhere. Her ninth collection is The Autobiography of Rain (Fernwood Press, 2024).

Keeping Diana Alive

1 July 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Jennifer Pinto

The plant I carried was so bulky and cumbersome that when I hugged it against my chest and carried it to my car, I could barely see where I was going. I had to peek through the small spaces between glossy, dark green, oval shaped leaves that seemed to emerge directly from the soil. The brown stucco pot was heavy and I struggled not to drop it while slipping and sliding across the icy funeral home parking lot. I was desperate for a reminder of my dad, something that might bring me peace after his sisyphean battle with liver cancer and my increasingly contentious relationship with my step mother.

At my dad’s funeral, this solitary plant was displayed atop a pedestal next to his casket. A peace lily in all her glory, standing sentry. There were also a few flower arrangements, but most people, at the request of my step mother, slipped cash in the donation box next to the entrance to help pay for the funeral costs instead. At the end of the service when everyone was lining up to head over to the cemetery, I snuck back into the funeral home and stole that plant. I knew it was the only possession I would ever have of my dad’s and, in my twisted logic, that plant belonged to him.

Back home, I looked for the perfect spot for the plant. I googled Peace Lilies and found that they adore bright sunlight. In fact the article said, “the more light your plant gets, the happier it will be, the faster it will grow and the more it will bloom.” It was obvious that sunlight was the key to keeping this plant alive. In the years leading up to my dad’s death, between calls with the oncologist and trips to the Cleveland Clinic, I hadn’t felt like enjoying the sun. My blinds remained shut most days. But for the sake of the plant, I let the light in. I placed the pot directly in front of the patio door and named her Diana.

If my dad were a plant he would have been a succulent, the kind you could leave in the corner windowsill for weeks at a time without a thought or a drop of water. He wouldn’t have minded. That’s how he was, easy to please and uncomplicated. Despite being neglected, he would continue to grow, his roots digging deep for water and his stem quietly reaching for the sun. He was kind to a fault and expected as little from others as possible, a people pleaser who stayed out of the limelight. I was the one who insisted that dad get the liver transplant, encouraged him to get radiation and then chemotherapy. I fought with my step mother over hospice placement, stubbornly refusing to give up.

It only took me a few days to realize Diana was dramatic if nothing else. She demanded water by collapsing in on herself. Her broad emerald leaves wilting down and falling over like a diva fake- fainting on a velvet settee. After her thirst had been slaked she popped back up, white spaths held high as if nothing had happened at all. Only to repeat her theatrical performance a few days later. Unlike my dad, she wasn’t afraid to demand what she needed. She wasn’t polite or demure; she had no qualms about turning her leaves brown to show her disapproval.

Following my dad’s death, I was paralyzed by grief. But as the weeks went by, I found myself distracted by Diana. I watched her carefully, moved her from window to window to get the correct amount of sunlight, stuck my finger deep into her soil to make sure it was moist and wiped the dust off her leaves with a damp cloth. I talked to her and laughed at her melodramatic ways. She may not have brought me peace in the way I had imagined but at least I know what it takes to keep her alive.

Jennifer Pinto writes creative nonfiction. She lives in Cincinnati with her husband and a Goldendoodle pup named Josie. She enjoys making pottery, cooking Indian food and drinking coffee at all hours of the day. Her work has been published in Sundog Lit, Halfway Down the Stairs and The Bookends Review.

Bookmark

1 June 2024 / Editor

Poetry by John Hoyte

I grabbed it from the bookcase, to read before bed.
The Problem of Pain, a two shillings and sixpence
Fontana paperback, from my college days.
It tackles the question, If there is a loving God,
why does He permit pain?
I chose it to see if C.S. Lewis’s writing
still resonated for me.
A bookmark fell out.
The Grand Hotel, Taipei, Taiwan.
Pain came surging back, engulfing me
in sorrow, though bitterness had gone.

The year my wife died had been a year of devastation.
To get away, Lisa, my daughter, and I flew
to Taiwan on a business trip.
We stayed at The Grand Hotel, and felt like royalty.
External opulence, internal grief.
I look back over thirty years.
My daughter’s daughters are in college
and I have just turned ninety-one.

I went to sleep in gratitude, thinking of my daughter
who has stood by me with love, grace and courage.

John Hoyte is a retired engineer, artist, and explorer.

Hell’s Kitchen

1 March 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Leslie Lisbona

We were in my father’s car on Sixth Avenue driving uptown towards Central Park, or maybe we were on Third Avenue approaching the 59^th Street Bridge, when my father said, “Don’t marry him. I’ll take care of you.” After a long silence I said, “But Dad, I love him.”

My mother had died a few months before, and it was just my father and I in the house in Queens where I had grown up. I worried about him. I knew it was too soon to leave him alone. Val was living in New Jersey at the time. My father put his arm around Val’s shoulder and convinced him to move in with us. “After the wedding, you can look for an apartment together,” he said.

Val moved in three months before our wedding. We slept in separate rooms. He called my dad Mr. Lisbona.

We got married on a beautiful day in April. I invited my mom’s friend Beatrice to attend.

On my wedding day, my father said, “Can you stay with me a little longer?” When Val agreed, I thought he was so understanding; he was so nice about it. But then I noticed how well he got along with my father. They sat in the living room watching TV together and laughing at the same jokes. Val walked around on Sunday mornings in pajamas while my dad made coffee for them both, and on Sunday afternoons the two of them went food shopping on 108^th Street. If something needed fixing, Val was eager to do it. He started calling my father Leon. When I suggested a neighborhood that might be good for us to live in, Val didn’t show any interest. My father said, “Stay here and save some money,” and Val smiled conspiratorially.

We lived eight months as newlyweds in my father’s house.

Toward the end of that stretch, Beatrice came for an overnight visit. I noticed how happy my dad was, and then I spied them. It was just a moment, through a slice of door: She was on the bed, he was in his bathrobe; he leaned over her. I caught my breath and recoiled. I slinked down the stairs and hurried out of the house. I walked to the subway and felt the urge to squeeze my eyes shut, trying to unsee the image of my father and Beatrice that kept fluttering to my mind. By the time I got to the train platform, I realized that this was my chance to leave. The moment had presented itself like a gift.

Without telling Val, I found us an apartment on my lunchbreak. The one-bedroom was walking distance from my office building on Sixth Avenue. That evening, after kicking off my boots, I gathered Val and my father at the round table in the kitchen and announced that Val and I were moving. Val said, “We can never afford it,” and my father said, “A two-year lease?” and I said to Val, “We have five days to pack.” My father lit up a cigarette and inhaled deeply.

A week later we took a few boxes of clothes and two rolled-up Persian rugs to the twentieth floor of 301 West 53^rd Street in Hell’s Kitchen. I liked the name of my new neighborhood. That first night, Val was working across the river in New Jersey. I was alone.

The apartment was bare. Our wedding presents, still in their unopened boxes, were scattered in our empty living room. Our only piece of furniture was our too-hard bed, which we had bought that day without thinking it through.

I lay in the bed and looked out the large plate-glass window to see the time and temperature flash atop a taller building. I listened to a bouncer arguing loudly with a patron at the back entrance of the Roseland Ballroom. I heard the trucks rumbling up 8^th Avenue and the horse and carriages ambling towards the stables. I wished Val were there on my first night away from home. Somehow, despite all the city sounds, I fell asleep.

One hour before I needed to wake up the next morning, my dad called, a pattern he took years to break. We chatted until I was sufficiently awake.

I put my feet on the Persian rug. I pulled out from a box something to wear to work. I walked two short blocks to my office and never wanted to set foot on the subway again.

In the evening, Val and I went to Central Park, walked to 9^th Avenue, and ate in a little restaurant. On the way home we stopped at Tower Records, our fingers interlocked. Val loved the spartan apartment and declared that we didn’t need any furniture. “Where will we eat?” I said. “In our hard bed,” he said, and we both laughed.

I loved him so much, and I was so happy.

A year later I was pregnant with Aaron, and my father remarried a woman who wasn’t Beatrice.

Leslie Lisbona recently had several pieces published in Synchronized Chaos, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, The Bluebird Word, The Jewish Literary Journal, miniskirt magazine, Yalobusha Review, Tangled Locks, Koukash Review, Metonym Journal, and Smoky Blue Literary. She is the child of immigrants from Beirut, Lebanon, and grew up in Queens, NY. Read Leslie’s earlier essay Taboule in The Bluebird Word.

Two Dolls and Three Kings

31 December 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Antonia Wang

I only ever owned two dolls, delicate treasures in a world where Barbies belonged to children with ties to distant lands like the United States or, in a bygone era, Venezuela.

My dolls weren’t the coveted reborn dolls of the ’80s, the ones I daydreamed about swaddling and adorning with miniature outfits like real infants. No, my dolls were not my first choice, but they were unique— a second-hand, silicone-skinned Japanese doll with straight chestnut hair, a miniature yogi ready to bend and twist to my whims. The other, a robust, plastic blonde doll with pigtail braids, remained shelved most of the time, but I could never forget her.

How did I come to possess a Japanese doll while living in the insular mountains of the 1980s Dominican Republic? My recollection is hazy, but I remember it as a gift from a Spanish missionary whom my family hosted one summer while she worked with the church. The doll had meager clothes, so I fashioned her an outfit with the little fabric I could find and my rudimentary sewing skills.

The blonde doll had been a “Three Kings” gift from my dad. Christmas gifts were for Americans. Dominican kids didn’t have Santa. We had the Three Kings, who somehow made no noise as they filled our rooms with their camels on the eve of January 6th, delivering our toys. Oh, coveted joy! They were the only gifts of the year for many of us. “At least you had toys,” my siblings would chime in. But this isn’t a sad story about growing up in a small town in the countryside of a humble island. This isn’t a sad story at all.

Sure, we had limited means, but we never lacked what truly mattered: a roof of our own, honest and loving parents, friends galore, and a multitude of cousins. Cousins to play hide and seek with, tackle homework with, attend church together, and, of course, get into the occasional trouble with. And then there were the lush mountains, always smiling around me, offering endless adventures and mysteries. Our home had no television when I was a kid, and it wasn’t until I reached my teenage years that we got a fridge. Bicycles or scooters were scarce, and cars? They were a luxury reserved solely for the ‘rich,’ although even those we deemed ‘rich’ carried their own burdens—a spouse who had migrated to the United States, the trials of managing a small-town business, or concealed guilt.

No, I never felt poor. We had what we needed and nothing more, except for food. Come what may, we had food—for everyone at home, for the neighbor who couldn’t afford to cook, for my grandpa who preferred my mom’s cooking though he didn’t live with us, for the occasional country visitor, my father’s third cousin, or the Haitian woman with a child who stopped by every few months. I couldn’t remember her name or whether she had a home. There was always plenty of food, even if my mom had to make herself a meal from our leftovers. But this isn’t a sad story, no.

This is a tale of devotion—a father who wanted to give me the childhood he never had growing up as a farmer’s kid in the mountains of Camú.

One evening, approaching January 6th, I witnessed a secret ritual. My late father, convinced I was asleep, concealed a grand, plastic doll within a duffle bag hanging from a nail on the wooden wall, believing he had hidden it where I would never think to look. I smiled and turned sideways, pretending to be sleep.

Outside, the chorus of crickets remained silent. The unsightly toads in the nearby miniature swamp, where taro root and yautía malanga thrived unbidden yet embraced, also remained silent. Nor did I hear a whisper from the brown geckos that crept about our small-town dwelling, which we regarded as an auspicious omen.

The next day, I didn’t say a word, filled with excitement as I eagerly awaited the surprise at the foot of my bed on Three Kings’ Day. I remained silent because, more than a toy, I cherished the joy of my father’s belief in magic.

Antonia Wang, poet, nature enthusiast, and yogi, weaves intricate, symbolic poems from the tapestry of everyday life and the natural world. Exploring universal themes of relationships, self-discovery, and philosophy, Antonia’s work exudes a nostalgic Caribbean essence. She writes in English and Spanish, and lives with her family in the USA.

a person ironing cloth — Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Pexels.com

How to Iron

13 October 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by N.G. Haiduck

My father did the ironing in our house. My mother was sick, not bed-ridden, but too sick to stand at a board pushing a hot iron over my father’s white cotton shirts. So in the evening, after supper (my father cooked) and the dishes (my sister and I washed), in the living room between the sofa and the armchair where my mother sat stone-faced in front of the TV, my father set up the ironing board.

He tested the steam iron by pressing it over a dishtowel. When the iron sputtered, he ironed: his white shirts, my pleated skirts, my sister’s ruffled blouses, my mother’s house dresses. He ironed the sheets. He taught me how to iron his handkerchiefs. First one side, fold once, iron, fold again, the monogram on the outside, iron, fold, iron. I progressed to pillow cases. Same method: iron, fold, iron, fold, iron.

To this day, my aunts disparage my mother (she died and, a few years later, he died) because “she made your father do the ironing.”

My father had a vegetable garden on a patch of land he rented from Miss Bliss, who owned the weather-beaten farmhouse next door. All summer long, I helped weed my father’s garden. On weekends, he sold tomatoes at a roadside stand on Route 51 in front of that old gray house, until Miss Bliss sold her property to a developer.

My father’s partner selling vegetables at the roadside stand was Mike, who had a cornfield down the road. I had to go to Mike’s house one Saturday to pick up an envelope. My mother, sitting in her armchair, called after me, “Don’t tell her I don’t iron!” Mike’s wife, Mary, ironed her husband’s white shirts perfectly.

A smiling plump woman, Mary opened the door, and I came into a living room filled with waves of freshly ironed white shirts, a few pale blue shirts mixed in, on hangers hooked over doorknobs, on rods attached to closet doors, and from the wing of a floor lamp standing next to a massive ironing board in the center of the room. It smelled like spring.

I had to step over a hassock and duck under the shirts to get to the kitchen, where Mary gave me an envelope (money from the business, I suppose). Dutifully, I brought the envelope home, but my mother said she never wanted me to go back there again. “I don’t want her to find out I don’t iron.” Of course I would never tell.

Just as my grandmother never told me. Only after my mother died, she said, shaking her head, “Too bad you didn’t know your mother before she started taking those pills.” I didn’t know. Nobody told me.

My husband says his shirts come out brighter and crisper from the dry cleaners. Still, in the evening, after dinner dishes are put away, I set up the board in the living room. I turn on the TV. When the iron is hot and sputtering, I iron. My husband’s shirts: back of the collar first, then the cuffs, run the iron up the sleeves, flip to the back of the shirt and the shoulder; then the front around the buttons, the shirt pocket, and last, the front of the collar. Same procedure for my blouses. Blue jeans: pockets ironed inside out, waist band and fly pressed twice, then the seams and a sharp crease. Pillowcases (but not sheets): lay flat on the board, iron, fold, iron, fold, iron.

N.G. Haiduck taught English at The City College of New York and now writes from Burlington, Vermont. Publications (2023) include: Aeolian Harp Anthology, Cold Lake Anthology, Kakalak, and BigCityLit. Haiduck’s first book, “Cabbie,” about a young woman driving a cab in New York City, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press.

Letter to an Estranged Father

3 October 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Angela Kasumova

Recently, on my way to visit a friend, I drove by Kitty’s Restaurant and Lounge in North Reading. Do you remember the time we went there? It was a Saturday, late summer, either in ‘94 or ‘95, and we’d come from Lawrence where we picked up my school uniform. We stopped by Kitty’s for lunch on the way home. It was a throwback spot: dim lighting, torn booths, cigarette smoke. The bathroom was all red tile and red vinyl and red toilets, like something from a horror movie.

We waited a long time for the food to arrive, and when it did, I remember giggling as I looked down at the brownish steak tip gristle sitting in oil placed in front of me. I don’t remember what you or Mom had, but neither was good. It was one of the worst meals we’d ever had. Comically bad.

I think we left without paying.

Despite the badness of the restaurant this memory is a happy one. We laughed and smiled in unity over the awfulness that was Kitty’s.

Not a day goes by where I don’t think about the tragic outcome of our family, my mind filling with “whys” and “what ifs” and “if onlys.” Lately though, I’ve begun widening the lens, allowing a little more light in.

Turns out we had our good moments, like bonding over bad meals.

Angela Kasumova is an emerging writer of creative nonfiction with over a decade of experience working in the fields of mental health and education. She lives with her husband and sons near Boston, Massachusetts. Read her first published piece on The Bluebird Word from June 2023: For Sale: Kawai Upright Piano, $1,250.