When My Father Calls Me a Pussy
it means get up it means he doesn’t care
about the callous on my palm or that I’m downwind
of the diesel fumes it means swing harder it means
I should feel ashamed that I stayed inside all day
playing my Game Boy I should be proud of the mud
on my shins kicked up by the four-wheeler
it means this gun isn’t going to shoot itself it means
how does he tell everyone in his Sunday School class
that his son wants to quit baseball again
which means he tried failed might as well be
a woman it means I’m not the son he wanted
I’m the son he got it means when I gut
the deer I should start at the nutsack I should skin it
myself with the guthook of the folding knife
I sharpened it means this is what it means to be
a man and not a wilted daisy it means this is what
I think a man should be which is to say an ax
stuck in an oak tree stump it means he loves
not me but the version of me I could be
which is to say not me which is a stone
it means if I want to burn this thing down I have to
start at the roots I have to use my own two hands
which can be knives held one way feathers another
it means this is what my father taught me
which is to hate myself it means his father
taught him not to cry when he shaved his head
on the porch those summers the hair sticking
to his forehead like grass clippings it means
this is how one man cuts down another
in an effort notch for notch to grow larger
Punch List, 1994
My father takes my hands and places them
on each joystick of the Bobcat. I’m too small
to reach the pedals, so his feet tip up the bucket
full of job site debris in the air above me.
I watch broken sheetrock hit two by fours
and crack apart like packed snow. It feels
triumphant to watch the scarred metal bucket
eclipse the high noon sun, the bucket’s teeth
slowly coming into view like a giant sea creature
rising out of the water next to a boat I am on
in the middle of the ocean with my father.
He is teaching me control, pull that lever
right there back, good, now turn the Bobcat left,
the machine jolting like a roller coaster
as it mounts its first incline. He is teaching me
power, and in these moments I can almost
forget how much he scared me, even then,
holding me in his lap beneath the pulled-down
safety bar. With each tip of the bucket
he is teaching me how to be him, to claim
a birthright of dirt and Tyvek, of Skoal
and Leatherman blades that sharpened
framer’s pencils behind the ears of men who speak
with the calluses on their hands like a clay tablet
of cuneiform in each handshake, of proving
something by what you’ve built or torn down.
William Fargason is the author of Love Song to the Demon-Possessed Pigs of Gadara (University of Iowa Press, April 2020), winner of the 2019 Iowa Poetry Prize. His poetry has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Prairie Schooner, New England Review, Barrow Street, Indiana Review, Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. He earned a BA in English from Auburn University, an MFA in poetry from the University of Maryland, and a PhD in poetry from Florida State University, where he taught creative writing. He is the Assistant Poetry Editor at Split Lip. He lives with himself in Tallahassee, Florida.