by Christopher R. Vaugha
and it remains scrawled
on her cheeks in red, as if
having scratched her there.
Giggles, I have a plum beard!
I ask, Will you have to shave?
She shivers her head twice,
We’d never do that, that is so
silly! In this house,
there’s no word for cleanse, or pit,
or blade. We only sense
things, the words for them
are birds concealed and chafing
against branches. Fruit
perishes twice—first stem-snapped,
again when we sink desire
into its flesh, leave
only wanting stone. Juice dries
to cooled memory,
faces draped in thin, stained veils.
My therapist once told me,
You have permission
to buy yourself a coffee.
Flying from the room
into June air so swelled
I swilled it down. Now I have
children, now they know
desire, but not its name.
How often I think
back to eight or nine, my dad
and I wandering downtown,
him pumping out of
7-Eleven all flush
with surprise: Cherry
Coke and a fresh Sporting News,
nourish for my obsessions,
yet my face went red
at the magazine’s price tag–
a dollar fifty
I doubted he really had.
This summer, plums have shot up
in cost. At Aldi,
my hand’s a quavering branch
above the plums’ round
rows. Each night, some fruit, some play.
Tonight, her shuffling feet, head
craning up to me,
still seated at the table—
How come there are lines
on your forehead? And I lean
to wipe the juice from her cheeks.
Christopher R. Vaughan’s poems address masculinity, mental health, and silence, and have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous journals, including The Cincinnati Review, Able Muse, Hawai’i Pacific Review, Off the Coast, and Del Sol Review. He was a winner of the 2020 Princemere Poetry Prize and has received support from the Community of Writers, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Indiana University Writers’ Conference, and Minnesota Northwoods Writers Conference. He was a Fellow in the Loft Mentor Series in Poetry and Creative Prose in 2022-23. He lives in Minneapolis.