Darius Atefat-Peckham
Two POEMS
Coronation
Covering the boy’s eyes, I whisper, You
are your father’s
father. Eye of his feathered throne. Your mouth,
receiving his ghosts
like a bit of milk
clung to your lip. Wipe it, bitter
as a tear, away. Turn north
from the woman, her mind beaten naked in a van.
From the child, his thoughts blooming through
his shirt. Your second thought is
always true. Take it, (and) for(give)
yourself. Lead
a comatose state. No matter, no mothers
in you. The crown is a pink mouth worth biting.
You are your own
son. North is north, wherever
you are. Directionless. Silent:
this space of as if
to say, it is
fathers all the way down.
Sundered Sonnet: If We Should Be Ghosts
Little reason to delay my everyday / haunts. I laminate my laments, frightening them short / of love poems. After sleepovers, my classmates whisper their findings. They live / in a Haunted House. Who had they heard? Dad, crying Welcome to the family! each time a / guest stumbled in on any embarrassing thing. Sopping the years / tears in his apron for the sake of cake. Cautioning, there’s only enough / for nobody, as the rental crumbles into ruin around us. / I’d like some savings, so I can have a little / ghoul of my own one day. Not a spirit / or saint. Or, ghost help me, a child. I’ve wanted grief / so long, growing it like a gesture, grooming it like a pig for the fair. Looking like me. Haunted / by playgrounds. Ghosted by crushes. Happening upon the sound / of my crying cowering like a child up too late and hiding within / my ear, eerily familiar. I am full of sounds of dying. Scrape of boys / flipping heel-kicks off a stony face. Creak of widows casting flowers in the dirt. Crush of the couple in my dreams tasting each / other beneath the whitening sycamore. My heart stops each time I think / of losing someone I can actually remember. I’m a ghost-fearing / man. I go to the graveyard every birthday eve, calling. / I break into orbs of light. Like the fog gathering / on a boy’s glasses. I pay my respects, steadily as the nightmists that come / each dawn, watering the stones.
Darius Atefat-Peckham is the author of How Many Love Poems (Seven Kitchens, 2021) and the editor of Susan Atefat-Peckham's Deep Are These Distances Between Us (CavanKerry, 2023). Atefat-Peckham earned his BA at Harvard University and is a current fellow at the Michener Center for Writers. His work appears in Poetry, Poem-a-Day, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere.