Text
In that time a father just shifts, or maybe it’s mothers, or who knows anyone really.
He teaches you some and holding an axe, before he peels away too, before the woods
always belonged to someone and you have to look for work. It’s in the woods when you can
and otherwise the fruit, get a little more if you set the ladders. You’re a slight stub when
someone calls you a man but you thought you had so much growing before that. Or it’s just
a fact, passed around from house to house. He’s only gone for poaching or some new woman.
I’m not sure there’s such a thing as childhood then. He’s not your father quite just like a man
knew your ma. You could set together some or learn a garden, you would work in the fruit and
then a little bigger in the woods or selling, maybe it’s my imagination failing, maybe you laugh
like a kid anyway and your garden pays for the school clothes is just oh that’s just how it was.
Who pays for the house, or are you moving place to place still. The other men just men but you
lower your lashes a breath, just so, I want the houses to empty as you grow, relations blankly
peeled off in the woods. You blessedly beneath anyone’s notice. That father quick before he
moved on, or your mother even, easy this one time as there’s no futures to worry, soon nothing
shared. He’s setting a moment soon to thump the door, soon to grow you up that slow inch more.
He’d pinch you off by habit but for leaving. There’s no reason to get real close. This is how I’m
going to give you a future near impossible, a natural neglect that lets you bolt, you flower. Say
that father never named it, maybe he says uncaring a little laugh, you’re the only one I ever seen.
Be damned, laughing easing this one time, if you aren’t the only one I knew. Hold my future
breath and wandering him carelessly out the door and bolt that door too. Later and looking
over your shoulder a little but why not with another man, you find some words for each other
later. When you are really grown, when this other flowered man asks somehow and puts his
hand right there, just so.
—Clare Johnson
Earlier versions of Unnamed and Unwomanlike were published together as part of "I Imagine I Come From Somewhere" in quiet Shorts Vol. I, Issue 4, Winter 2011.