Daughter of the Sandman

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.