The Squall, Soon

I claim the rain as my father.

Who hung its wet form more often in my door
than the man whose DNA wrote the map of my palms.

This body is almost entirely water.
My fingerprints are his, a sand garden

raked by the waves of his movement, by the presence
of tides, anchored to bone as hollow as his name,

whispered in storms. His face was built of screen doors,
easier to witness the world through his rust than see

the man. For years I believed the shriek of hinge
was my name. Named after him, the sound of doors

closing. The sound of absence. Our grass always was
eager for blood. And the rain, eager to sing the skin clean,

pulled the torn skin aside when I fell, open to inspection
by insects, I watched the water pool in the bowl of my wound,

listened to crickets divorce the dark with their legs.
Explosion is common with new birth. The wet

taught me mud, taught me womb, before fathers,
before abandoned, born with the knowledge of water.

We way we slide within our skin, barely contained.
The way teeth form a seawall, to contain our drowning.

Each storm brings the scars to the surface, my feet
to the door, eager to meet the sky halfway through its fall,

a child running to introduce himself to his father.