A Former Boyfriend’s Son Calls to Talk to My Daughter, by Shoshauna Shy

for he has somehow become attuned
to her frequency despite their being thrown
into a class of 600 at the local high school.
I hear him ask for her over the telephone

     and am flung into the mountains of Estill County
     in honeysuckle June with moccasin snakes slapping
     their way through warm and muddy water
     amidst arguments that didn’t dissolve in bed or out

certain beyond the shadow of a doubt
that after we make it back home to the Midwest
his will be one voice
I’ll never hear again.

***

About “A Former Boyfriend’s Son Calls to Talk to My Daughter”: “Were this fiction, it would seem contrived. But it’s a poem based on actual facts – and staying true to “the way it happened,” which is something I usually don’t feel is necessary for a poet, became essential for me when writing this particular poem. But only in certain ways – as I did alter someone’s gender!  It needed that in order to be a better poem.”

Shoshauna Shy heads up the Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf program out of Madison, Wisconsin with the mission of bringing poetry to the general public in unexpected ways. Poems by poets world-wide have been produced on java jackets, bookmarks, postcards, decals, attached to bicycles, maple syrup bottles, and spilling out of jawbreaker machines. More about this program can be found here.

Shoshauna Shy