The last time I saw my father, he was a gray cloud of ashes drifting over the rail of the Sunday Creek Bridge. At first he fell to pieces the way he used to do after mom died when the chaos of three kids pulled him in all directions and he gathered himself in the bottom of a bottle like a genie in reverse, leaving his hungry children’s wishes unfulfilled. But then he coalesced into something more than the fragments of what he had become and something less than who he had been, a man who chose to drown himself, along with his children, in self-pity and 7-and-7s. He hovered for a moment over the slivered surface of the drought-battered river. His mouth formed a kind of snarl as his whiskey-ravaged voice whispered words only the wind could hear. I waved my arms—not in surrender, but to scatter him into nothingness. And when he finally fell all the way down into the rocky river, I prayed that what little water was left would be enough to carry him far away from me. Just to be sure as I screwed the lid of his urn tight, I muttered, “I wish for rain,” and dropped it down among the rocks so I could never open that bottle again.
Kip Knott is a writer, teacher, photographer, and part-time art dealer living in Delaware, Ohio. His third full-length book of poetry, The Other Side of Who I Am, is available from Kelsay Books. A new poetry chapbook, The Misanthrope in Moonlight, is available from Bottlecap Press. You can follow him on Instagram at @kip.knott and read more of his work at kipknott.com.