Toi Derricotte: My dad & sardines

my dad’s going to give me a self
back.
i’ve made an altar called
The Altar for Healing the Father & Child,
& asked him what i could do
for him so he would
do nice for me. he said i should stop
saying bad things about him &, since
i’ve said just about everything bad
i can think of &, since . . . well,
no, i change my
mind, i can’t promise
him that. but even healing is
negotiable, so, if he’s in
heaven (or trying
to get in), it wouldn’t hurt
to be in touch. the first thing i want is to be able to
enjoy the little things again—for example, to stop peeling
down the list of things i
have to do &
enjoy this poem, enjoy how, last night, scouring
the cupboards, i found a
can of sardines that
must be five
years old &, since i was home after a long
trip &, since it was 1 a.m. & i hadn’t eaten
dinner &, since there was no other
protein in the house,
i cranked it open & remembered that
my dad loved
sardines—right before bed—with
onions & mustard. i can’t get into
my dad’s old heart, but i remember that look
on his face when he would
load mustard on a saltine cracker, lay a little
fish on top, & tip it with a juicy slice
of onion. then he’d look up from his soiled
fingers with one eyebrow
raised, a rakish
grin that said—all
for me!—as if he was
getting away
with murder.

From The Undertaker’s Daughter. Copyright © 2014 by Toi Derricotte. Reprinted by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

Toi Derricotte is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently, I: New & Selected Poems (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019). Derricotte is the recipient of the Academy of American Poets’ 2021 Wallace Stevens Award, given to recognize outstanding artistic achievement in the art of poetry over a poet’s career. The Poetry Society of America awarded her the 2020 Frost Medal for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry, citing, “There are few poets who are as brave as Toi Derricotte; brave in her subject matter and brave in how she insists that even the deepest hurts must sing on the page.”