Melissa Fite Johnson
Image by Tima Miroshnichenko from Pexels
Melissa Fite Johnson is the author of two full-length collections, most recently Green (Riot in Your Throat, 2021). Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, HAD, and elsewhere. Melissa teaches high school English in Lawrence, KS, where she and her husband live with their dogs.
Abecedarian at my Father's Deathbed
At the movies the night he died. Make-
believe I wasn’t. Put me in a
chair beside my mother, fitful
doze, magazine flip. My father’s un-
even breathing, his
feeling something about to happen.
Go, he’d told me. The guilt. What if
he knew, sent me away? I can’t
imagine the beeps, doctors
jostling my mother out the door. I
keep forgetting—my mother and me.
Liar. I can’t make it real, can’t put
myself in a room I left, can’t make a
night be another night. I can
only watch not-myself, a character.
Picture Grey’s Anatomy. Picture ER.
Quiet the soundtrack. My face un-
recognizable, prettier. Guest
star, one episode. That’s all it
takes for a man to die.
Un-do it. Not even his death, just the
vision of me in the theater,
wasting his last hour. Examine the
X-ray, find me where I wasn’t—
yesterday, twenty-five years ago, a
zillion what-ifs, each of them torture.
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