28. fossils
poetry comes to me in dreams
disguised as daddy roy, saying:
whatever doesn’t kill you
makes you stronger
then grins like an idiot because
cancer ate daddy up
from the inside
60 years ago
leaking in through
a mole the size of a
bit of scree
probably from one of
the radioactive rocks
he dug up from
the nevada desert
so the story goes
the geology professor
fades into fossils
as his daughter
the english professor
now twice his age
feels herself strike the
deadening silence like
flint against steel
