Harmless
1.
He used to tell us
to visit the Daddy Store
and pick out someone else
if we were so unhappy.
It was one of his go-to moves
like telling my mother
she was just like her mother
so might as well live
thousands of miles away, too.
He liked to suggest candidates —
Arcadio Casillas, Bill Strong —
fathers who were known
to throw whiskey glasses
and haymakers
at their children, our friends,
making him look
if not saintly, harmless
in comparison.
2.
I always imagined
the store aisled
like any other
with a clearance section
in the back full
of fathers set
to expire by the weekend
and, there
for a reason, hiding
from the kids like us
standing side by side
in the makeshift light.
3.
But say we did,
say, after listening
to him dare us
to choose,
we decided
what was best
for the family
was a new father,
there was no
Daddy Store
to return him to.
There was only
the consequence
of coming clean
and being left
with no father
at all—ours
going on and on
about how naive
we were to think
we had it bad
and how soon
we'd learn
the grass wasn't
ever greener,
that our friends
were beat
with serving spoons
and the thick
end of pool cues
and yet
we were the ones
complaining.
What we wanted
was someone
who let us be
a family. What
he wanted, fished
for relentlessly,
was an excuse
to pack his shit
and go.
Bobby Elliott is an award-winning poet and teacher based in Portland, Oregon. His debut collection of poems, The Same Man, was selected by Nate Marshall as the winner of the 2025 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize and will be published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in September. Raised in New York City, he earned his B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and his M.F.A. from the University of Virginia, where he was a Poe/Faulkner Fellow and won the Kahn Prize for Teaching for his work with undergraduate writers. His work is forthcoming from or has appeared in ONLY POEMS, The Cortland Review, RHINO, Poet Lore and elsewhere.