The Process

When I was six, I started crying
in the backseat of our minivan on
the way home from Sports Authority. I

said “Dad, are you kidnapping me?” He
said “no,” as parents say to their
children’s invalid questions |that
is not a fact|.  Perhaps

that was my first encounter with
context-lifting.  |The mind exits the
situation and looks at it like a story
prompt in grade school: what do you
see here?|  The easy

path was to re-enter the daughter
self and feel the leather of my new
glove and see the hard new metal
bat and think of the softball that would
be played.  Solution for a plush bodied
human.  Days

come when your chipped off pieces are
patched up with tin.  Such armor
prepares us for extended lifting, enables full
sight.  I went into the

home of a strange man, and I
said, “are you my father?”  He, being
of tin as well, did not answer, knowing
the question was not altogether invalid |this
could be so|.  Only his eyes were foreign,
but then I hadn’t seen a mirror in
days or
weeks.  With the tin, as it goes,
blood forgets itself, occasionally.