Elegy with a Death Star Inside It
after Larry Levis, “Elegy with a Darkening Trapeze inside It” Jamie Uy I. At Disneyland, the father is shouting. I don’t know why he is shouting at the Happiest Place on Earth but his son is at the bottom of Space
Mountain scrunching up his eyes as if his father is a bad outtake. An
animatronic ghost in a haunted mansion, the yeti in a dark rollercoaster
we all paid too much to ride. Then he grips the boy’s wrist and the son is wailing, bleating, Bambi-like, and screams YOU ARE NOT MY FATHER and the father swoops in, picks up his son, disappears on Main Street
into the throng of too-bright balloons and butter popcorn and fake Fire
Department trucks. The parade continues. I don’t remember what the boy was wearing, only that his eyes were preternaturally blue. I wonder if the father remembers what kind of shirt he picked out for him, from the dirtcaked drawers of their cramped motel, for his birthday.
The problem with fathers is that they were once sons and their
connections to their own fathers is like rope dangling from an apple tree, ragged and frayed, a noose or a naval knot. II. My submission to Women’s Psychology Quarterly’s FATHERING IS A FEMINIST ISSUE read:
“It is easy to see the parallels between Joseph Campbell’s The Hero
with A Thousand Faces, George Lucas’s Star Wars, and Shakespeare’s
Hamlet. Consider: Yorick’s skull. Consider: Luke Skywalker’s vision of his
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