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Joshua Michael Stewart has had poems published in the Massachusetts Review, Louisville Review, Rattle, Night Train, Evansville Review, Cold Mountain Review, and many others. His first full-length collection of poems, Break Every String, has been published by Hedgerow Books in April 2016. He received his BA from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He’s a Teacher/Counselor, working with individuals with special needs. Visit him at www.joshuamichaelstewart.com.

Joshua Michael Stewart

FUNCTIONAL

My father won’t read poetry. He taught

my brother the ways of paintbrush

and canvas, played guitar before I was born

but after Nam, lost interest, saw no sense

in art. I’d like to think, surviving war,

I’d see no better reason to create, proclaim

and praise I am here, but what do I know,

given my armed conflict with the self?

My father once cradled a dying soldier

missing everything below his waist,

and watched a starving boy convulse

after a sergeant handed the child a candy bar—

his body no longer understood food.

My father pulls shoulder muscles

as he masons walls, lays foundations.

He cracks knuckles against engine blocks,

torqueing wrenches. Because the dead

remind him that splinters in his palms

are gifts, he builds cabinets, chairs, houses.

His life is work, no room for self-indulgence

or anything frivolous. But don’t we also live

in rooms not constructed out of lumber and stone?

Art is an alarm clock. Art is a ladle of beauty

lifted to the lips. My father. On the table

he planed, sanded, stained— where we’ve sat

together after a long time of not sitting together,

where we’ve eaten slow—I want him to dance

and afterwards, I want him to see the scuffmarks

on the pine as affirmations of purpose—of loving

the lost with raucous praise, of letting the gone go.

— Joshua Michael Stewart