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POETRY

“Arc Eye,” read by Cody Adams.

Arc Eye

My dad is a 3rd generation
welder fabricator; he can build and
fix anything. I studied literature at
a university, and can’t change
a flat tire. He doesn’t know me and I
don’t know him, but I’ve seen his hands:
after 40 years of hard labor, they look like what I
imagine the Son of Man’s flogged back looks like.

As a kid, I stole peeks of fireworks explode from
the tip of his white-hot torch even though he
warned me that I’d go blind if I stared without the
protective face shield. But I’d seen him weld with
face unveiled, so I watched him sew liquid beads of
molten metal with robotic precision, my virgin
eyes hypnotized by shooting stars sizzling from
his hands, momentarily raptured by the irresistible
shower of sparks that wept over his creation and
swept me up into a blazing furnace where my
baby teeth gnashed until they were ash. The brilliant
show pinked my pale face so that I shone like a little
red-headed Moses carrying steel tablets inscribed with
the sins of my family dating all the way back to Seth’s dad.

He worked until the very last week of his life,
back hunched like a weathered boulder,
palms pierced by a trillion teensy steel slivers,
fingers split and swollen fatter than pork sausages,
eyes blind from breaking his own commandments.

We buried him yesterday
(even though he asked for the incinerator).
Afterwards, I dreamt of exhumation, that they ripped
him from a tungsten-tank-coffin and put a MIG gun to
his head, forced him to weld two I-beams into an
iron crucifix. They made my zombified dad help a
feeble fellow lug the cross beyond a maze of chain
link fences to a rusty iteration of Golgotha. Marvelous sparks
–the kind that cremate corneas in a single glance–
rained from my dad’s eyes as he tacked glowing-red nails
through hands curled in the excruciation of
ultraviolet radiation. Threnody from the throats of denim-clad
saints drowned out the roar of the welding machine until
it was finished.

I hope my dreams are wrong.
I hope Zion’s library is adjacent to its foundry.
I hope I find him building something too beautiful to see.

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Originally from Buffalo, NY, Cody Adams is an expatriate teaching literature in Toronto, Ontario. His poetry and fiction have appeared in Ekstasis Magazine, Three Line Poetry, Cacti Fur, Defenestration among others. He also serves as a Board Member for Forefront Festival.

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Photo Credit: Welding by Jeremiah and Reagan Kemper, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 Deed, via Flickr.com.