Chronic Angers

I remember my father 

curled up with a Miller Lite dripping condensation, 

rage-watching ‘This Old House.’ 

He was very convinced of the fallibility of 

their electrical work, and I was very convinced of his ability to make anything spark up. 

I remember my father 

holding me upright by my scruff while his bare foot 

thumps against my chest as though it is my heart. 

For as angry as I am and have historically been 

I cannot presently muster up anything but sorrow 

for him, and thankfulness he was not wearing his 

steel-toed work boots. 

I remember my father 

handing me homebrewed moonshine before I 

guzzle it like gasoline. 

That night, I went to bed dreaming 

of his gun locker, fidgeting at the sheets, 

praying for his new wife. 

That night, the house burned down. Prayer becomes 

fire. Fire is the worst way to go. 

In my father’s juvenile photographs there appears 

to be a deep sickness in his eyes which I know to be illusory. 

The skin drink stitched onto him 

was grandfathered in— 

he has defected from the faith and is jonesing

for a hatred he’s never known, a sadism he’s worn only 

incidentally, as costume. 

I remember my father 

drunker than Hell, slumped and 

urine-soaked in a dining room chair. 

My mother had called me from bed 

to smell his breath and tell her if he’d been drinking beer or vodka. 

I asked her why it had to be me and she told me 

‘because he got sober 

for you, and he should look his shame in the eyes.’ 

They conceived me on purpose, 

an anniversary gift for a spoiled marriage, 

and I wonder if, during the moments where ghosts of agony briefly 

became ghosts of pleasure, where their 

lesions became orifices, they imagined who I’d become. 

During which thrust—or was it during orgasm?— 

did they decide I was to be a daughter— 

a cop; some beer-soaked apple slices; 

the side effect of self-medication? 

There are many questions I will carve into the 

marble of my father’s gravestone. 

[Why can’t I write about your 

childhood despite your redemption hinging upon its horror? 

What darkness enshrouds your point of origin, Dad? 

Why can’t I go there except for in dreams?] 

I leaned in to smell his breath and that was the closest we

had ever been. He had been drinking vodka, if you were wondering. 

Voltaire tells us if God did not exist 

it would be ‘necessary to invent Him.’ 

Mary Shelley tells us whoever creates us is our ‘god,’ 

but whoever abandons us is our ‘father,’ 

and that there is a very thin line which is sometimes dissolved. 

No one makes any mention of ‘human’— 

I imagine this is due to the fact we, as a species, have 

failed in divorcing ourselves 

from our self-preservatory nature.

About the Author

Riley James Russo is a teenaged author and poet split between Ohio and Pennsylvania who endeavors to localize and examine the human condition through horror-litfic and poetry.