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.
Copyright © Edward Doyle-Gillespie | Year Posted 2025
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