In The Dream...

Suzanne Morris

December 3, 2021

...Daddy outlives Mama–
the opposite of how it really happened.

He wanders away from home some nights,
an aging man in his hat and overcoat,

and can’t be found.  I phone, but no answer.
I worry until one day he reappears

still in his hat and coat,
on his way to someplace he never says.

In the end, we offer him space
in our building.  He accepts, but

there are so many people in the way,
it’s hard for him to get past them

to unlock his door.  Then there is a problem
with the key; it has broken in half.

Daddy has been dead for
more than thirty years, yet

I awake feeling stricken
as if I had just hung up from the call,

and wondering if I could have
done more to keep him here.

Suzanne Morris is a novelist with eight published works, most recently, Aftermath (SFA University Press, 2016). Until recently, her poetry appeared only in her fiction. However, last year she was invited to contribute seven poems to an anthology entitled No Season for Silence - Texas Poets and Pandemic, (Kallisto Gaia Press).