Danielle Beazer Dubrasky
Father’s Day
The stories all start with the cars—the Corvair, Mustang, Barracuda—
each bought for under $600, each in the shop for over $2,000.
My sister remembers when the back of the black Mercedes
fell off in the middle of traffic and my mother steered the clunking car
to the side of the road with four small children
waiting while she called the garage from a pay phone.
My brother talks about the silver Jaguar without an engine,
its leather seats a favorite place to hide.
This your car? The high school boys would ask me,
eyeing the bronze barracuda with fish bowl back window.
One by one they disappeared:
the Mustang bumped off a snowy route 29 in a traffic pile up,
the Barracuda rear-ended by Caroline Wiston’s Audi Fox after school,
the Corvair totaled by my brother on a sharp curve down Skyline Drive.
Only the Jaguar remained after his death, a faded silver gleam
crouched on the side of the driveway until an old friend towed it away
and promptly sold it off. In a few years they were gone, along with the Quixote
who looked at a shaving bowl and saw a steel-bodied Classic.
About the writer:
Danielle Beazer Dubrasky directs the Grace A. Tanner Center for Human Values and is an associate professor of creative writing at Southern Utah University. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Chiron Review, South Dakota Review, Ninth Letter, Main Street Rag, Pilgrimage, saltfront, Cave Wall, and Terrain.org. In 2017, Red Butte Press at U. of Utah published a letter-pressed folio of her poems called Invisible Shores; and her chapbook, Ruin and Light, won the 2014 Anabiosis Press Chapbook Competition. She is a two-time winner of the Utah Division of Arts and Museums original writing competition in poetry.
Image: Still Life by Gregor Perušek (1887-1940). Oil on Masonite. 80 x 60 cm. By 1930. Public domain.
