By Lisa Parker
I know his stories like my own;
the coon hunts, the woman who fed him
a pail full of cornbread wrapped in linen
when he walked 50 miles to West Virginia
and stopped before her house to ask food for work.
The stories come more frequently now
from his chair beside the heat stove.
He knows I will remember them all,
but he tells me again to be sure I get it in the retelling,
how the mines could blow at any time if coal dust built,
how he pulled the body of a man from beneath the rocks
and saw his eye sitting halfway down his cheek.
It is important, these details.
There is no poetry to pretty up
that man's face, or my grandfather's,
hungry in youth, still aching against it
all these years later.