Stephen Lackaye

After All

My daughter asks me for a strawberry,
which she calls a small, good thing,
after she’s asked me once already, and I heard
only the dust shifting inside the grey wall.
I had just put down the phone from some fresh
disappointment, germane to circumstances
that I knew I would have to outlive, when,
Please, can I have, she repeats herself
in faith, one small, good thing. A strawberry,
I have learned, takes 7 months to cultivate
from seed. A vole is 20 days from conception
to its birth. Despite cliché, the goldfish will
remember your face its 10 to 15 years of life,
and if released to local waterways may grow
to 13 pounds on detritus, zooplankton,
the dark opportunities of space. It’s true,
I’ve sought to take the world as granular,
dissolving to solutions, in order to survive
one setback at a time. I once also begged,
however audibly, a small, good thing,
an ear that was preoccupied. So what
misfortune now wants my attention?
I’m busy with this one life still discovering
its appetites, the small, good voice
she gives to them, the sun that stripes
her feet dangling beneath the table.

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Stephen Lackaye’s first collection of poems, Self-Portrait in Dystopian Landscape, won the Unicorn Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award and Eric Hoffer Prize. Recent poems have appeared in Southern Review, Southern Indiana Review and Los Angeles Review, among others. He lives with his family in Oregon, where he is a bookseller.