Phantom icicle three inches ‘round
Shoots into my left temple,
The immediacy profound;
It occurs to me to temper
The onset of panic
With a mental list of events
From the last thirty-six hours
It was my dad, I decide:
The phone call about his Amazon account
And how he claims he is “locked out” —
But his mind may be unsound
His body for certain enfeebled
(Seeing no one, doing nothing
But call my sister or me with these conundrums)
It is Christmas Eve
A storm outsider’s shed four feet of snow
And I had to act the insufficient plow
With no energy or physical power
Which is when the phone rang
And the Amazon matter relayed
With an urgency suggesting nuclear winter
While a real one bears down like a bomb
***
Twenty minutes of talk with my dad
Reduce me to shivering pudding
From afar I can be of no use
A computer is Greek to him anyway
The correct words I use are as white noise
With an amicable throwing up of hands,
I try to resume my day
Now it’s tomorrow and the icicle,
Which is disturbing and painful,
Is awling its way through my brain
Would I tell my dad this is him?
Would this convey the tiered pain
Of sitting on the phone with a helpless old man
And fruitlessly discussing a machine
He never understood
And will never understand?
Bio:
Casey Burchby is a writer, book dealer, and arts administrator living in the Sierra Nevada. His previous work has appeared in Cerasus (forthcoming), Hobart, The Raven Review, ZiN Daily (Zvona i nari), the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Village Voice, Publishers Weekly, and others.