Steel Truss System (inspired by “All My Pretty Ones” by Anne Sexton)

Father, serendipity rides us apart

where you combined your ingredient with that of my mother;

your only compensation a single crumpled dollar,

and a fragment of your single crumpled daughter,

leaving me here today confused and upset,

alone at Disneyland while you took a nap,

my chromosomes split in two,

looking back at the vestige of your presence in my childhood:

one Monopoly game,

five winter coats I didn’t need,

helping you pack for a trip I wasn’t invited on,

learning to ride a unicycle at your urging,

albums of a childhood I know too well.

I touch my cardboard face. How things have gone to hell.

But my eyes, as fixed as they were in my bowl-cut epoch,   

draw me back to when I thought things would be different.

I stop here, where a small girl in red crocs

holds a dripping ice cream cone

next to a salt-and-peppered man

smiling with his mouth but his eyes gaze elsewhere...

A token piggy back ride, the young girl’s pink floral dress

ruining the backdrop of your hiking backpack

and your neverending solo quest.

I flip the page and the man’s gone,

I see the little girl smiling with her dog;

the chubby chihuahua mix gleams up at the camera too.

I remember that dog walk, that day, that year

although all these faces seem far away now;

as happy a childhood as the man knew how.

This is the untarnished photobook that my mother made

to chronicle the girl’s trip to visit the man in Australia;

as pristine and unblemished as the day it arrived

fresh out of the plastic wrap: I open it, greeted by the girl in a striped shirt and jeans shorts,

awkwardly posing next to a koala, her hand outstretched— the koala looks forced, it pulls away, peering outside the frame.

I flip the page to see the girl and the man

in front of the Sydney Harbor bridge

I close the book, erasing the image.

These are the snapshots of a family, stopped in places.   

Side by side at the Golden Gate bridge;

here, with a foul ball at a Giants game;

here, on a hike amidst the eucalyptus trees

the invasive species from Australia,

the man stops to tie his shoe;

here, in front of chips and guacamole.

Now I close the book, my architect, my creator,   

my first lost keeper, to keep or look at later.

I open another rectangular black book

and see the girl and the man at Fort Point

under the red-painted steel bearing strata

why this obsession with bridges

the connection between two separate islands

separated by a vast sea;

the bridge may have been built

but the toll price is too high and so

it has very little traffic.

My God, father, each year that goes by

without you present, will I drink down your 

custom modern twisted glass   

of wine? The catalog of my hurly-burly years   

goes to the bookcase in the living room

to wait for my age to pass, to remember me by.   

Only in this small shelf in the corner,

flanked by War and Peace and the Book of Exploration—here—

 will these memories of bridges and eucalyptus persevere.

Isabella Hochschild ('21)

POETRY