Absent Dad, 2017
My hand cups your shoulder like a wet starfish.
I stand close to your (harmless) body,
place ice slivers on your cracked lips.
I hold your dry fingers,
witness the nurse (who barely looks at you)
wiping your shit-stained bedsheet.
I touch my lips to your creased forehead,
clutching a towel to rub your cold mixed-up feet.
The dutiful daughter, crowned with seaweed,
ever your servant.
You whisper your final word, “guilt,”
maybe not for the defilements themselves,
but for the divorce, what you thought kept us apart.
Now, old Navy man, I am left transfixed on the beach,
puzzling over the line in the sand we drew between us.
Bust of King Louis XIV (1638-1715)
Ton Majesté! Forgive me for knocking into you! One can’t tell kings from statues nowadays. Is that a tutu you’re wearing? Shall we dance a pas de deux? Are those gloves yours or your mistress’s? You have so many gloves and mistresses, who can possibly tell? Your chiseled marble face looks down from en haut, gloats at me and other passersby.
Dad, did you ever love me?
Your hairpiece looms large, absurdly puffed, with those darling spit curls flouncing haughtily over your shoulders and chest. Who knows how many lice and bedbugs have crawled underneath? Is there lapdog poop under that smelly headdress? What about gooey chocolate or jellied semen?
Dad, how naked are you under that wig? Is your hair sweaty, plastered to your head? “I’m just Joey,” Mom told me you often said.
Dad, your stubbly chin, your hands brutal and tender, how could you betray my innocent trust? I accept now, but I cannot forgive.
What did you do when your father was dying? Hazily, I see you in a dark suit, crying soundlessly as you herded us kids through a Westchester cemetery to find the gravestone of a dog you never met.
Louis, beneath the wig, your lips curve up in a smug smile: Après tout, you’re the Sun King in command of all these inferiors, among them your daughter, Louise Françoise. Perhaps you have just bedded her mother, Madame de Montespan. Or does your dreamy look and smile tell of your blood-soaked wars, waged from a chaise longue? Your robed arm sweeps out grandly above your pedestal as if you were issuing a royal decree. You thought Bernini crafted a flattering bust, didn’t you? Don’t you know, artists can see when a king has a moldy baguette wrapped round his neck like a flea collar?
Alison Carb Sussman, a Pushcart Prize nominee, has garnered numerous awards and publications throughout her writing career. Sussman is the author of Black Wool Cape and On the Edge, a poetry collection and a poetry chapbook, respectively. Her poem “Gone Mom, 2023” was chosen as “highly commended” by Hannah Sullivan for the 2024 Moth Poetry Prize. She won the Abroad Writers’ Conference/Finishing Line Press Authors Poetry Contest and read her winning poems as their guest in Dublin in 2015. She was also a 2016 finalist in Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Award for Poetry and a finalist in Naugatuck River Review’s 11th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest. Her poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Gargoyle, The New York Times, Rattle, Southword (Ireland), and other publications. Some of her poems have been translated into Mandarin Chinese by Yongbo Ma. She lives and writes in New York City.