While My Mother Worked The Early Shift

My daddy dipped my mornings in milk gravy
so thick and velvety I wanted to play
with it, mash it into the palm of my left hand.

He offered cathead biscuits before
school on dark January days after the
Christmas hangover. It was almost enough.

How did a barrel-chested man learn
this magic? Softened like golden butter
in a dizzy aftermath, he did too many wars perhaps.

Did you ever kill someone I asked him.
He never looked me in the eye to say one way
or another. It was cold like a scrambled yesterday.

He hugged me like it mattered on Monday
mornings as he led me, hand on shoulder, out
into the world. I basked in his warmth all day.

John Dorroh likes to travel. He often ends up in other peoples’ kitchens sharing culinary tidbits and tall tales. “Learning about cultures begins with the food,” he asserts. Six of his poems were nominated for Best of the Net. Hundreds of others appeared in journals such as Feral, River Heron, Burningword, Kissing Dynamite, North Dakota Quarterly, Penstricken, and North of Oxford. He’s had a book of micro-fiction and two chapbooks of poetry published in recent years. Once he was awarded Editor’s Choice Award for a regional journal and received enough money for a sushi dinner for two.