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Daughter of the Sandman 

War-story woman stands astride 
the country now,
book-store tour bleary now,
author hands aching 
from signing the $20.99
paperback professing her father’s 
Marne Corps Desert Storm glory now.
Book-tour daughter 
lays inside the hotel room now,
calling her shattered dad 
across the gulf,
calling the shaking-hands dad man 
“Geppetto” because,
when she calls,
he is always in the workshop basement
of her childhood,
still struggling with band saws 
against protesting wood.
War-story woman asks the first-draft
question that has tied down
her mind, even during 
her best-seller tour,
for so long now:
How well did she write the smell 
of a burning man?
The sanding-dad Geppetto, 
exhales against his labor,
says that her words were enough
to peel the covers from hard-backed 
leathernecks in the Kuwaiti desert,
circa 1990 -
seethes through his teeth,
says how he can smell 
the roasted beef of muscle,
sulfur stink of hair,
sticky-sweet spinal fluid 
spiraling up 
like a black-cloud desert jinn,
how her work makes him 
proud, but that, now,
he must hide in his workshop,
in his work,
in this room,
to honor his writer daughter
and build his bookshelves 
even wider.

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